I intervene in this debate for a number of reasons; in terms of my own interest and feelings—less important—and as one of the other Ministers of the three involved in the application of this legislation, if it passes, as it seems from the expression of welcome it has had from the Opposition, it will pass without too much contention, I have an involvement. I must also declare an interest both as a veterinary surgeon and as someone with a training in physiology and biochemistry because, of course, some of the maintenance of food standards in regard to meat and livestock in the past has been the responsibility of my profession and I am proud of my profession's role in this area. Also, I admit to a very considerable interest of a personal kind in the matter of food quality.
To begin with, we have, I think, to recognise that with every passing year the need for legislation of this type increases precisely because the complexity of the food industry increases.
At a time when all of the food consumed in a particular home was produced within a few miles of that home, whether it was meat or whether it was vegetables, and there was no elaborate processing, apart from smoking, salting or pickling there were no problems. There was no deep-freeze. There was no method of prolonged storage. We were not getting things from the opposite ends of the world. It was not a question of colour. It was not a question of shelf life. There was not an immensely complex marketing pool which now embraces the whole world.
At that particular time the need for protection was much less because the commercial pressures producing inferior quality were much less but, as the food processing industry becomes world-wide, the need for increasing consumer protection legislation becomes every day a greater need. We ought to pause for a moment in thinking of legislation of this kind to ponder on just how world-wide the food industry is. There is not a continent whose food we do not expect routinely to get, even in relatively small areas of habitation, even in villages, and there is hardly a country whose specialist products we do not expect to get; from the original pickling, salting and smoking, the range of mechanisms for preservation which now exist is enormous and increasing all the time even with radio-active treated food possibly becoming an article of consumption. Add that to freeze drying, deep freezing, bottling, canning and the whole gamut of preservation techniques. Then we have the phenomenon that foods are not sold now entirely as a pure piece of meat, or a pure piece of wheat, or a pure piece of cabbage but as mixtures of all these things in very complex packs, even in packs that consist of whole meal with bits of this and that, from the beginning through the different courses to the end, sold as a single industrial product. So we have this ever-continuing complexity and we have extremely great commercial pressures of all kinds.
I want to say a word now about the question of additives because to some extent, I regret to say—I will amplify this—one sees a systematic debasing of natural human taste in food by commercial pressures. I will give some examples. It is well that the public should be aware of this process and know what is going on. In the different categories of things which may contaminate food there is a category of things which are deliberately added somewhere along the production chain in order to increase the commercial attractiveness of the product. Many sorts of colouring would fall into this category because the public think, if the thing is pure white, or bright green, or bright red, it is somehow better and we need education, which we have in the basic sciences, to convince people that this sort of prettying-up is very often not alone not producing an improvement but is actually producing a disimprovement. There are, of course, careful regulations in regard to what colours may be used.
Deputy Collins gave the example of sulphur-dioxide which is very widely used, not as a colourant but as a preservative. At certain levels it is quite all right but at certain levels it is not all right. Some of the nitrates used in meat preservation can be changed into nitrites et cetera. There are all sorts of complex chemical changes taking place in food and things that start off perfectly safe may end up as being unsafe. Things like sulphur-dioxide which at certain levels are perfectly safe, correct and normal to use, at other levels may be unsafe.
Indeed, the unscrupulous manufacturers may use either preservatives or anti-oxygenant or colours or various products which have not been checked out for their long term effects. In the past and this was world-wide, we biochemists and psychologists, and people concerned with the actual chemical workings of the body, have been much too light-hearted. They have carried out tests on a few hundred mice for a year or two years but we do not live for a year or two years. Things are going into children which may have effects 50, 60 or 70 years later. We have been much too optimistic in the past on the basis of short-term tests and small numbers of animals and a vastly greater amount of caution is used on the part of those carrying out biological tests than there was a decade ago. They are much more reluctant to say with certainty that such-and-such a thing is perfectly safe.
We have had all sorts of examples of things that turned out not to be safe. I am not trying to spread alarm because the standards, world-wide, are rising continuously. The extent of the danger is being recognised ever more and a Bill of this kind is an important step although it is by no means the end of the road in the question of food quality control. There have been mistakes, there have been errors of judgment and worse than that. We have also got the circumstances not just of the food industry becoming more complex but the effect of the increasing complexity of the economy of the whole world has a bearing on food in ways that do not seem obvious to us.
The Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries and Deputy Collins, mentioned the question of farm chemicals for treating seeds, killing weeds and killing insects. The farm chemical industry is now a huge industry with immense research but all of these things can get into foodstuffs and can do damage. Again, in the fairly recent past, we have been too lighthearted as to what was safe. Thalidomide is a long way from food and I do not wish to spread alarm. I recognise that there are ever more rigorous standards and it is right that this should be so, because the mistake of thalidomide was with a drug for human use and it is a mistake that will echo down the decades.
As a biochemist and one who has been involved in organising trials for veterinary products I am aware that in the past there has been the attitude: "Sure it is not for human beings; it is for animals, or for plants or for killing insects so it is not quite so dangerous." We have this process of accumulation. We have seen people recently killed in Japan from mercury poisoning, mercury coming from the environment. We see the pollution of the oceans with all sorts of heavy metals. We see the pollution of bits of the environment with radioactive products as a result of nuclear tests.
We have had the situation that a person putting pesticide on a field feels that by the time the plants grow, and by the time all these processes go on, it will be so diluted that it could not possibly do any harm. There is the same argument in regard to radio-active products and heavy metals, like mercury, which can be poisonous. What people forget is that living systems, and what we eat are living systems—we have not got to the stage of having synthetic foods yet—concentrate the products. There are plants, shellfish and fish of all kinds. We have a food chain and we may see enormous concentrations in certain areas. Fish in US rivers were producing high levels of some of the weed killers. The water which flowed from the weed killer-treated land or the insecticide-treated land into the river had a very low level but the fish gathered this stuff up and the people who ate the fish received quite a blast out of it.
One has to remember the whole complexity of the economy, whether it is industry or agriculture, the whole barrage of the powers in the chemical industry, and they are very beneficial powers because we could not carry the world's population at its present level without these products, and I am not decrying them, but because they exist and are used so widely we have to have an ever-growing public awareness. We have to have the sort of regulations produced by the codex alimentarius and the sort of standards of which this Bill will permit the introduction.
We have also to make reference to the business of advertising in the food area. I regret to say that we have a small number of people promoting food by saying things that are not true. While more and more of our young people will have sufficient scientific knowledge to know that they are not true and, therefore, the advertising, far from causing people to buy the product will turn them off it, we still have a large number of people who can be hoodwinked.
As a veterinarian and a dairy farmer I am disposed to be pro-butter and anti-margarine. That is my prejudice and I am declaring it. Margarine is produced by very big combines which are very rich while butter is produced by the products of separate farmers going into the co-operative creameries throughout the world who do not have the big budgets. We have had a huge world-wide campaign to suggest that in some mysterious way that if you eat margarine you did not get heart dissease in the same way as you would if you eat butter. We have been told that margarine is better for us from a health point of view. There is a great deal of evidence that butter is better but it is produced by scientists working in universities who do not get the publicity.
The margarine lobby has been less than frank. There is some evidence to show that one who eats some of the margarines has a lower cholesterol level and one will not have heart disease but there is also evidence the other way. It is not a simple question and there is the distortion of the truth about food quality often in semiexplicit ways as has been done by the margarine lobby. They have been rich enough to pay reputable scientists but it is possible to get the arguments on both sides and these arguments should be stated.
There is a product widely advertised which suggests that if one gets some glucose quickly into the body in some mysterious way one's recovery after illness is hastened but if one eats a piece of potato or a piece of bread it is very rapidly broken down into glucose anyway. In some cases this happens within seconds. This is misleading the public in the special value of a food product which comes as the end product in digestion anyway when one eats carbohydrates. That is misleading people and is not quite honest. Twenty years ago we had the weight of advertising telling people about the mysterious health-giving qualities of whiteness. Somehow or other if a thing was made very white or clear or pure it was better for the individual but this stopped when it was discovered that the bleaching of flour with agene produced a poison. That was found and stopped but not by the people bleaching the flour. It was found by animal experiments to discover why these forms of hysteria occurred.
There are many examples in the history of the food industry of people light heartedly going in because a thing looked whiter, cleaner or purer. We have to stop the type of advertising which says that whiter is healthier or clearer is healthier. We have to get people to accept that quality often means a minimum of treatment and not a maximum of treatment. It should be left alone as much as possible, not coloured, bleached or whitened. The less natural the product the worse it is but there has been a brainwashing of the public.
There has also been a brainwashing of the public in some obscure way about super-cleanliness. For example, we have had the phenomenon which permitted the widespread use of antibiotics in animals and humans. Using antibiotics on new-born babies was simply a mechanism for producing antibiotic-resistant strains of organisms which were then dangerous contaminants of the environment. In recent decades we have seen the widespread and uncontrolled use of antibiotics on farm animals, often not to cure disease but, if one could believe the advertising, to prevent it. It did not prevent it but it produced a widespread occurrence of drug-resistant strains of organisms which are a potential health hazard to humans. Salmonella organisms which cause food poisoning are an example.
The commercial pressures which tend to debase quality are enormous. I do not suggest this Bill is the end of the process—it is an early part of it. There is the dreadful, dishonest approach used with regard to slimming foods. If a person consumes more calories than he uses he puts on weight but there are people advertising all kinds of foods which suggest a person can eat them without getting fat no matter how much he eats. That is not true. This kind of approach confuses the public. We must get around to the question of honest advertising of food as well as the matter of guaranteeing quality.
We see as a worldwide phenomenon, but most of all in the developed countries, the health food movement. Often this is based on mysticism without scientific basis but at least those concerned with the movement are telling people where they can get simple, pure foods that are not messed up, with some guarantee as to the quality. That part of the health food movement is a benevolent and necessary one but, generally, the movement is for a small number of people who are already interested in food and the products cost a little more. The task of a Government is not to look out for those who can spend a little more on expensive foods but to protect the wider sections of the community because they are the people who are most susceptible to brainwashing by advertising that is not honest and are most in need of protection. I am not suggesting all advertising is dishonest. I have given some examples where there was dishonest advertising but there is plenty that is not.
We are moving towards highly processed foods, with complete meals at one end of the spectrum. Through advertising immense pressures are brought to bear on human taste. It looks as if people can be manipulated as to the kind of foods they should enjoy eating, which is rather depressing. We must remember that since we live the three score years and ten and, to some extent, that we are what we eat, and especially what we eat when we are little when our metabolism is rapid, there is a tremendous need as a matter of basic public welfare for the protection of the consumer. It is a human right to have food that is clean, healthy and not polluted or contaminated or altered unnecessarily. It is a human right to have food to a standard that will guarantee not alone the absence of disease but the best possible development of the individual. It is a right that must be protected both by public consciousness and by the law.
I should like to say a word to three sectors of our food industry because they concern my Department. They are the manufacturing, the distributing and the retailing sectors. They could well feel that this is a kind of busybody Bill produced by do-gooders which makes their task more difficult by introducing unnecessary controls and regulations. I should like to tell all these sectors that not only is this legislation in the interest of the consumer for whom it is primarily intended but it is also in the interests of the three sectors of the food industry.
If we consider the countries that have developed remarkable specialist food exports, they are the countries that have very high standards on the domestic front. When there is a highly critical home consumer market there is this tremendous quality. I shall give two examples of this. In Scandinavia meat products and crispbreads are exported throughout the world, even though one might think it would be difficult to export crispbreads economically. In France there is the great cultivation of the people with regard to food quality and they have large specialist food exports. In fact, with cheeses they are able to get three or four times the price obtainable for ordinary, run-of-the-mill cheese. The amount of milk in unit weight of an ordinary cheese and a highly specialist cheese is the same but one is much dearer than the other because it is a special product. The more cultivated the public taste, the more difficult the legislation, the more the food industry of a country has high standards forced on it, the more it is competitive and able to make its way on the market-place of the world on quality and diversity.
Far from injuring our food industry legislation will help it. It will not be applied without ordinary compassion and commonsense. It will be applied by the three Ministers involved in a reasonable way and in the recognition that one cannot do things overnight. Proceeding with the application of the present codex alimentarius conditions and future conditions in the pipeline is not protecting the consumer at the expense of the manufacturer. I want to emphasise that it is in the interests of the manufacturer also.
We might consider the shopkeeper who may think that some of these measures are just tiresome rules; the question of inspecting, the potential question of seizing, the investigations to ensure standards are maintained. For an individual on a given day that may be a nuisance but for retailing as a whole, for satisfying the needs of a more sophisticated public, those who welcome this and apply it wholeheartedly are those who will benefit. It is not in conflict with the interests of the distributing or retailing sectors, which is to satisfy to the highest level the wishes and needs of the customers.
I wish to emphasise again that there will be reasonable understanding in application and implementation—not latitude or laxity. There is the recognition that we cannot have enormous changes suddenly or behave in an arbitary or unreasonable way. However, applying these rules is, beyond doubt or argument, good for the consumer, which in the end means everyone. The producer and the retailer must eat also. It is also for the producer, the distributor and the retailer who are concerned to ensure that they honourably satisfy the consumer and, secondly, to ensure that in Ireland we have a strong food industry, able to compete in the market-place of the world as well as on the home market. We must be able with truth—in the long run it is the only real way—to say to any other nation in the world that our food is as good, and in the vast majority of cases it is better. We must welcome the most rigorous controls. Otherwise we cannot attain for our food industry the place that, due to the natural quality of our materials, rightly belongs to it. That is the place of being absolutely in the forefront of the world, being the very best in the world.
I have dealt with matters that are not related to the small print of the Bill and I have not tried to deal with matters raised by Deputy Collins which are primarily matters to be replied to by the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries. I wanted to make some of the points I have made because the wholehearted acceptance and implementation of both the detail and the intention of this Bill is a condition of the health of our food industry. In the long run our food industry will always be one of the most important strands of our whole economic and industrial growth.
