This week I am in Crete. Before you say lucky man' (indeed I am), be assured that I am locked in a hotel for five days of meetings. A long time to be indoors, but things are stirring once more on the European food scene. The Crete meetings are the culmination of a decade old process to map out a Euro standard for collecting information on food consumption. Britain created its National Food Survey in World War 2. Very useful it still is. But the EU initiative stems from a need to track nutrients not just foods. Why? Because nutritionists and epidemiologists know that the diet we eat is a major factor in our patterns of disease. Not the only factor, note. Genes, environment, lifestyle, all have an effect, too, in a complex interaction but diet is a factor in 60,000 preventable deaths annually. With diet related disease becoming big news across Europe in the 1980s, the European Commission decided, I think sensibly, that there should be an attempt to standardise how member states collect information. Then the 1996 Amsterdam Treaty gave the EU greater public health powers, so now it is moving from just harmonising data to making positive recommendations about diet. Most EU countries set national dietary guidelines. Some see them as contentious. Food industry barons and neo-liberals cry "foul" or "nanny state", while public health specialists point out that industry doesn't pay the bill for all that heart disease and diet related cancer. Cheap food has a hidden cost, they argue. At Crete, a three year programme, in four working parties, is coming to a head to set EU dietary guidelines. Will they be weak? Leave it to individuals? Say it's all lifestyle? Wallow in scientific uncertainties? Or will the experts agree they have an historic opportunity to set broad parameters for Europe's food supply? I hope the latter. The CAP is production led when it ought to be health led. But we couldn't offend the subsidy farmers, could we? {{NEWS }}

Topics