Riding the storm

We could probably manage without some headline-grabbing E-numbers, concedes Richard Ratcliffe. But dispense with the remaining 390-plus additives approved for use in the European Union and half the products gracing our supermarket shelves would disappear overnight.

"Ban benzoates and sorbates and you'd have to pull most dilutible and carbonated products from the shelves at a stroke. You'd also risk potential explosions caused by fermentation," he says. Ban stabilisers and ice cream would be crunchy, jams wouldn't set properly and salad dressings would separate. Remove modified starch from products that have had to withstand shearing, pumping or pasteurisation and the texture would be unrecognisable.

As for margarines and low fat spreads - forget it. The uniform dispersion of fats and water that makes these products possible would become impossible without emulsifiers. Remove antioxidants and they would go rancid within days.

"Like it or not, we eat with our eyes," says Ratcliffe, who is also a former president of the Institute for Food Science and Technology. "If people were actually shown what these products looked like without additives, they'd have a far better understanding of why they are there."

Manufacturers have of course gone to great lengths to reduce the offending E-vil numbers, says Ratcliffe, who has held senior roles in product and process development and quality control and assurance at Unilever, Cadbury Schweppes and Tate & Lyle. But they are increasingly becoming stuck between a rock and a hard place, on the one hand under pressure to reduce fat, sugar and salt, but unable to replace them with anything that consumers don't have in their "store cupboard".

The problem, suggests Ratcliffe, who has been working as a consultant to the food industry for the last 15 years, is one of education. Consumers are suspicious of additives - a suspicion fuelled rather than assuaged by many leading retailers and manufacturers - because they don't know what they are or what they are doing.

Of course, not all additives are as pure as the driven snow, admits Ratcliffe. "Take Red 2G (a synthetic coal tar or azo dye used in cooked meats, jams and drinks), one of a group of additives that emerged from reassessment by the European Food Safety Authority with an amber light flashing. Quite rightly, it's been taken off the market."

Rather than demonstrating that all additives are dangerous, such regulatory scrutiny should reassure people that the system works, he insists. "We recognise that the science is evolving and that things approved in the 1970s need to be revisited."

The FAIA, which started life as an arm of the Chemical Industries Association in the late 1970s, was designed to counter negative media messages about additives and help keep members in touch with each other and evolving legislation. It became a more formal association 10 years later. More recently, it has set up a functional food ingredients group and broadened its membership.

With the industry now under attack on several fronts, requests for radio, TV and telephone interviews are coming thick and fast, most recently following the publication of a paper about a UK government-funded study by Southampton University into the effects of additives on children. While the study covered just a handful of colours and the preservative sodium benzoate, it prompted front-page headlines such as "The proof additives are as bad as we feared".

Meanwhile Asda - the UK's number-two supermarket - has been quick to exploit the opportunity, announcing plans to "cut additives by 2008", when in fact it has only committed to removing artificial colours and flavourings.

Such a disproportionate response inevitably tars all additives with the same brush, says Ratcliffe. But coming out with all guns blazing to defend anti-caking agents to the death won't sell many newspapers, he concedes. "The irony is that the E-numbers system was developed to give consumers confidence in additives. Let's just say that the plan backfired spectacularly."

To find out more about the FAIA, visit http://www.faia.org.uk or email Richard Ratcliffe at rbr1@btconnect.com

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