Normally I wouldn’t have given a second thought to the pâté in my fridge this morning. It was well past its sell-by date – a hangover from the excesses of Christmas. Until, that is, I read the advice of the Food Standards Agency this week.
In a story about an apparently thriving online retailer from Sheffield that sells biscuits and pasta tins past their prime, the FSA said: “Eating food past the best-before date does not necessarily put someone at risk from food poisoning.”
I often ignore these signs, anyway. Like a lot of people, I trust my reasonably receptive (if over-large) nose. But on this occasion I decided not to risk it. This was pâté, and the wording referred not to ‘best before’ but ‘use by’. And checking with the FSA, my instinct was right. ‘Use by’ is an indication of food safety, while ‘best before’ is merely an indication of food quality (although curiously not in the case of eggs).
Which brings me on to the subject du jour: pigs. A Select Committee report, out this week, reveals 66% of pig imports would be illegal if produced on British farms. And the MPs lay the blame for the parlous state of UK pig farming squarely on New Labour’s decision, in 1998, to ban the stall-and-tether system, while the rest of Europe continued to confine its sows.
This practice is to be the subject of a documentary by Jamie Oliver at the end of this month, and the industry is holding its breath and waiting to see what impact on consumer behaviour Oliver is likely to have, given the lack of options available to supermarkets for our higher-welfare British pigs.
But the other calamitous year to which we should refer is 2001, when the UK banned the use of food waste in pigfeed in response to FMD. As a result, soya is shipped halfway round the world. Now I don’t want pigs to eat my pâté, but with £10bn of food going to waste, surely it would be cheaper and greener – and perfectly safe – to feed them on past-it pasta tins.
In a story about an apparently thriving online retailer from Sheffield that sells biscuits and pasta tins past their prime, the FSA said: “Eating food past the best-before date does not necessarily put someone at risk from food poisoning.”
I often ignore these signs, anyway. Like a lot of people, I trust my reasonably receptive (if over-large) nose. But on this occasion I decided not to risk it. This was pâté, and the wording referred not to ‘best before’ but ‘use by’. And checking with the FSA, my instinct was right. ‘Use by’ is an indication of food safety, while ‘best before’ is merely an indication of food quality (although curiously not in the case of eggs).
Which brings me on to the subject du jour: pigs. A Select Committee report, out this week, reveals 66% of pig imports would be illegal if produced on British farms. And the MPs lay the blame for the parlous state of UK pig farming squarely on New Labour’s decision, in 1998, to ban the stall-and-tether system, while the rest of Europe continued to confine its sows.
This practice is to be the subject of a documentary by Jamie Oliver at the end of this month, and the industry is holding its breath and waiting to see what impact on consumer behaviour Oliver is likely to have, given the lack of options available to supermarkets for our higher-welfare British pigs.
But the other calamitous year to which we should refer is 2001, when the UK banned the use of food waste in pigfeed in response to FMD. As a result, soya is shipped halfway round the world. Now I don’t want pigs to eat my pâté, but with £10bn of food going to waste, surely it would be cheaper and greener – and perfectly safe – to feed them on past-it pasta tins.
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