The Guardian view on the cost of cost-cutting

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/food-safety-cost-of-cost-cutting

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The shocking picture the Guardian reveals today with its investigation of the chicken-processing business is a brutal demonstration of the real cost of cheap food. The price is not paid at the supermarket checkout but in cases of food poisoning. Two out of three raw chicken carcasses carry the bacterium campylobacter, and a significant minority are heavily contaminated. Campylobacter in chickens is responsible for most of the 285,000 episodes of food poisoning the bug causes. It is at the very least a memorably unpleasant experience. For some, it is much worse. On some estimates, one victim in 25 needs hospital treatment. A few become fatally ill. Yet this is a preventable problem, something that, as one food manufacturer observed to an National Farmers Union food safety conference, would have been dealt with years ago if, say, it turned food green. But to the naked eye, it is invisible and undetectable. So it is cheaper for the abattoirs to carry on with their cost-saving corner-cutting and leave the buyer to beware.

This is where the Food Standards Agency should step in. It is meant to police the producer in order to protect the consumer. That means that it must operate with a good knowledge of the food industry but be transparently independent of it. This is not what is happening. Of its 10-member board, mainly appointed by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, six have food or farming industry connections. The chairman, Tim Bennett, is a past president of the NFU. Today, in a serious setback for the FSA's own campylobacter campaign, he used his casting vote to delay a plan to name and shame retailers and processors by publishing quarterly statistics on contamination.

The price of food is, rightly, a serious concern. It has a particular impact on poorer families, who spend a disproportionately large amount of their income on it. Food prices have been rising for the past seven years, while supermarkets' profits have been squeezed. Only the discount chains are prospering. Only on Monday, the Tesco boss, Philip Clarke, became the latest to feel the harsh blast of shareholder displeasure, unceremoniously evicted from office on the eve of a party to celebrate 40 years in the company. But, though the price of food may be up, it is only back to 1997 levels in real terms. And as the campylobacter revelations show, the cost of cheap food is a lurch back to 19th-century food politics. Last year, the Guardian revealed that in some supermarkets horsemeat was being substituted for beef. Now we expose the frightening failings in abattoir hygiene for chickens. Politicians have to move on from the folk memory of the impact of the salmonella in eggs scandal more than 25 years ago. It is true that the egg industry collapsed, but it also cleaned up. British eggs are safe. The chicken must come next.