The 'Clean Label' Question

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 976 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2015

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For over a decade consumers have become finely attuned to E-numbers, flavourings, colourings and additives in our food. Food manufacturers have changed the way they do things in pursuit of 'clean label' - a more natural sounding ingredients list. But do we fully understand the new processes involved, the terms used and how safe they really are?

Sheila Dillon talks to Joanna Blythman, in her first broadcast interview about her new book 'Swallow This' in which she investigates some of the processes involved in making products taste and look good and last longer and her concerns about the ingredients and the secrecy that often surrounds them. We hear reports from food development teams about how they find new ways to produce food and ask the regulators if we can be sure they're safe.

Photo by Alan Peebles.

Transcript

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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. dot B.C. dot co. UK slash radio four and now enjoy the podcast. I was standing in the Rice Museum in Amsterdam and I was looking at this still life with
1:08.5	cheese, Van Dyke, old master depiction of big chunky cheese and nice bread, grapes, apples.
1:17.0	And I thought that's really making me hungry.
1:20.0	If the Old Masters were around today and we asked them to draw pictures of what a lot of people
1:26.0	have in their shopping baskets, I don't think they would recognize many of the things that
1:30.7	we are buying as food because they're very complex constructions of very high-tech
1:36.5	ingredients and I just don't think they'd want to paint them if we assembled a still life with
1:42.3	processed food.
1:43.4	It certainly wouldn't be such a romantic picture, but the old master is what got writer
1:48.2	Joanna Blitheman thinking again about the modern food industry. She's written a number of award-winning books
1:55.0	casting light on the food business
	...

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