Britain's Food Safety Net

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2012

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Who makes sure our food is safe and how? A report on Britain's food safety net.

The Food Standards Agency is reviewing who makes sure our food is safe and how that work is carried out.

Currently the UK's 434 local authorities employ 2800 people to police our food. With with austerity measures underway there's now less money to spend on those services and budgets for Environmental Health, Trading Standards and public analysis are coming under pressure.

It's resulted in food sampling rates and the number of inspections on businesses coming down. Professor Erik Millstone, an expert on the UK's food safety system, believes this could result in an increase in risk from food borne illness.

Already rates of Campylobacter, a bacterial form of food poisoning, are on the rise and so any future safety regime will have that as one of its main priorities.

Sheila Dillon interviews Tim Smith, Chief Executive of the Food Standards Agency, about the cuts, the FSA's review and if economic pressures could lead to an increase in risk to our health.

Producer: Dan Saladino.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.0	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:20.0	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.3	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	Hello, I'm Sheila Dylan and welcome to this BBC download of the Food Program.
0:45.8	For information on the BBC's terms and conditions of use, visit
0:49.4	W.W.
0:50.3	dot BBC dot co-
0:52.6	UK slash radio four and now enjoy the podcast
0:57.4	in 1858 in Bradford somebody had been trying to adulterate some lozenges with plaster of Paris and by mistake they used arsenic instead.
1:10.0	We are literally a wash with counterfeit vodka at the moment. We're finding chloroform.
1:14.3	The ones containing methanol can have immediate acute effects, ultimately blindness.
1:19.7	Two food stories separated by more than a century that help explain how, through hard battles
1:25.1	fought over food scares, some real tragedies and cases of food adulteration and fraud, we've
1:31.5	developed a system designed to protect you and me from food that harms us.
1:36.6	That system is overseen nationally by the Food Standards Agency and delivered by local authorities.
1:43.0	It's a system now undergoing major change.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.