‘Produce of Britain’ must mean what it says

[Anthony Butcher]

‘Produce of Britain’ must mean what it says - Times Online

Stricter rules have been drawn up to prevent consumers being duped by labels that suggest meat and other food has been produced in Britain when it was imported from abroad.

For many shoppers, terms such as “Produce of . . .” “Origin”, “British”, “Scottish”, or “Welsh” implies that the place of processing and the origin of the ingredients are the same.

New guidance from the Food Standards Agency stipulates that food companies must not use the phrase “produced in the UK” if the main ingredient has been imported. The only exception is for products such as chocolate, where it is obvious that ingredients such as cocoa beans are not home-produced.

Lord Rooker, Food and Farming Minister, has called on supermarkets to be more open with consumers about the origin of food, especially meat and dairy products.



The main contention is the rule under Section 36 of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968, which states: “Goods are deemed to have been manufactured or produced in the country in which they last underwent a treatment or process resulting in a substantial change.” The watchdog has said that if meat is turned into pies or pork is cured to become bacon or ham, this process is a substantial change.

Meat can be decribed as Welsh, Scottish or British if the animals have been born, reared and slaughtered in the country. If meat is imported and then packed in the UK, the label must make state the name of the country where meat was produced and then list separately that the packing was in Britain.Supermarkets are also warned to take care than instore promotional material such as flags do not mislead.

[Astrocat]

It just sounds similar to a situation where a company imports steel from America, oil from Iraq and plastic from China then combines them with other raw materials produced within their own country (let's call it country X) , building them up into a car within a factory inside that country, and sends it to market as 'produced in country X'

People could go a step further and declare 'you are what you eat, if animals are raised on foreign food, such as grain grown where rainforest used to be, then those animals should not be declared to come from a different country from the one in which their food originated'

Which would be a perfectly valid approach, since the pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and insecticides used by industry will accumulate in the flesh and body fluids of that animal .... so, if DDT is banned in the UK but a UK citizen eats flesh from an animal who has been fed DDT-laced crops , which had been grown in a country where DDT is still legal.... then, they will be getting a dose of DDT whether they want it or not.