The creeping deregulation of the food industry, and the amazingly widespread corruption in the inspection process, has led to a situation in which there is effectively no one guarding the food supply. Consider the fact that twenty years ago, rapeseed oil was forbidden in foodstuffs due to its oleic acid content; canola, which is "low oleic" was developed specifically to get around that ban. But now, *ordinary* rapeseed oil (which gives me intestinal distress of a nature you do *not* want to know about) is showing up in foodstuffs, and some of the manufacturers are obfuscating it by calling it "high oleic vegetable oil" in their ingredients list as though that was a *good thing*. How did they get this approved? Systemic corruption. It will probably take a decade to find all the places where problems have been allowed to creep in through seemingly minor incremental changes in standards and practices, and I *hope* that it will get some *intelligent* action. Too often, in a campaign to fix something, other things end up getting broken because badly written, poorly conceived legislation gets on to the books.
Now, in the case of salt content, clearly there's NOT a genuine need to tell *all* food suppliers that they need to cut back on that ingredient; some are so low already that they've taken the level below the point at which it's found naturally in unprocessed foods as a whole, which isn't healthy either. Such actions need to be targeted to the places where the *are* problems, not scattergunned across everyone's path as this would be.
I am reminded once again of the reason why I no longer can supply T-shirts for children; effective next week, if I sell a shirt for a kid, I have to be able to prove that *I* had the product tested for lead and pthalates; I can't even rely on my suppliers' testing of the components that they manufactured. So I simply don't go there anymore. And I will NOT be bashful about telling the customers just exactly *why* I can't and won't be selling them printed shirts for their kids anymore.
Bad legislation and bad regulations can go both ways. |
