I enjoyed taking part in a fairly good-humoured knockabout with Michael Pollan, Julian Hunt (from the Food and Drink Federation), and Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight on Tuesday to discuss Michael's book In Defence of Food. As I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of sympathy with Michael's views that we should all eat a mostly plant-based diet and not too much of it. The Agency's eatwell plate shows how this can be put into practice. But I do think that telling people to eat what their grandmothers ate both misses the point that the world has changed (rightly or wrongly, people don't have the time to cook in the way that they used to) and, more importantly, unnecessarily restricts the range of foods from which they can choose. That's not to say that everything's OK. Far from it. The problem of obesity and 'overnutrition' is the defining public health issue facing this and future generations. But the answer is not to look backwards, but for government, the food industry and consumers to face up to the challenges by looking forwards. For our part, the FSA needs to continue to raise awareness of what constitutes a healthy diet and draw upon good science to help bring about changes in dietary habits and monitor progress towards dietary targets.
The food industry needs to step up to the challenge of re-formulating products to reduce fat and energy content in the way that they have started to do for salt, labelling food contents more clearly (the EU has just published its proposals yesterday, including on front-of-pack labelling), by using the traffic light colour code, and giving much more consistent messages on healthy eating ('additive-free' won't help the obesity issue, I'm afraid).
And, of course, we all need to put some effort into making healthier choices about our food and lifestyles. It's not going to be easy, but harking back to a mythological Arcadia is not going to help. Got any comments? Have your say on the blog.