Review of Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence
The Truth about What May be Hiding in Our Food
Oct 5, 2009
With this groundbreaking book, Felicity Lawrence takes the reader on a journey to the seedy underworld of the food industry. It is the world of processed meat adulterated with chemicals, poor working conditions and chlorine-soaked lettuce leaves. Supermarkets, with their hold on farmers and strong links in government, call most of the shots she claims, while farmers, already trying to scrape a living, are forced to pay the supermarkets to keep their products on the shelves.
In our quest for cheap food, we have practically destroyed it. A chicken breast is now not good enough as it is, it needs to be pumped with water and cow proteins before sale, to make it appear plumper for the hungry consumer. Intensively reared animals (including fish and prawns) are routinely fed antibiotics to combat disease; the long-term effects of this on the humans who then consume it are still not fully known.
The Concept of Choice
Felicity Lawrence writes a convincing argument throughout the book, and claims that clear food labelling (not, she says, that the average adult needs a PhD to understand) can at least allow us free choice. If a consumer's only option is cheap food, at least he should be told what went into the food during production.
In addition, she explores the business of Fair Trade products. How much of the final price does the Fair Trade coffee farmer receive? Or are we unwittingly lining the pockets of supermarkets with higher profit margins on this "added-value" product?
The book makes for uncomfortable but gripping reading. She covers advertising, particularly the food adverts aimed at children for highly processed breakfast cereal and cereal bars. A child, she states, who has been bombarded with advertising in-between children’s TV programmes and then put in front of a vending machine, does not exercise any choice of his own.
Despite the somewhat disturbing subject matter of the book, Felicity injects parts of it with humour, to lighten the tone. It is written with a warm familiarity, as if recounted by a friend. She is also well-researched. She has met the gang masters who employ people to wash and pack our vegetables, travelled to Uganda to speak to coffee farmers, and discussed the pitfalls of prawn farming with producers in the Far East.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in food. What emerges most strongly is that while consumers believe that we have an outstanding choice of food, more so than any generation before, the opposite is really true. We lurch from one food crisis to another, inject our meat with chemicals, add more to our bread in the form of vaguely labelled "flour improvers", and buy tasteless under-ripe fruit from supermarkets (did you ever wonder why the fruit and veg aisles in supermarkets do not smell of ripe fruit and veg?). Do we really understand food labelling and what all this means with regards to the choice we are really given?
Lawrence remembers a market in Spain, where a huge variety of tomatoes were on sale. Slightly bashed ones for soups and sauces, small sweet tomatoes for salads, large red ones for stuffing and green ones for making pickle. Now that is choice.
Not on the Label is written by Felicity Lawrence and published by Penguin, 2004. ISBN: 9780141015668
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