Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:55 pm on 22 September 2021.
Thank you, Presiding Officer. I've agreed to give a minute of my time to Cefin Campbell.
'We are what we eat' is often quoted, and examples of the consequences of poor diet are all around us. We have record levels of heart disease, diabetes and other diet-related illnesses, some of which we are only just beginning to understand. When we go shopping, cost tends to be the most important consideration of whether we buy something. Other considerations are: does it look good, is it organic, where does it come from?
On top of that is the barrage of advertising that encourages us to think that buying product X will make us happier, more successful and, in some cases, healthier. The Advertising Standards Authority has a role in limiting the more outrageous claims, and the Food Standards Agency and local authority regulatory services are charged with making sure food that is sold is fit to eat. But what of food standards? It is unclear how the Food Standards Agency is paying attention to food quality, instead concentrating on what might kill us. The adulteration of food was illustrated very clearly in the 2013 scandal called 'horse burger'. That was the most dramatic example, but we know that there is increasing concern, not least in this Chamber, about the amounts of salt, sugar and trans fats being sold in processed food, and there is increasing demand for more regulation.
Fraud is also an issue, and I was very pleased to read that Hybu Cig Cymru are doing their own monitoring to protect their good name. You may have read that they engage the services of a world-leading product fraud investigator to test that the lamb and beef sold in shops with the HCC label on it was indeed the premium Welsh product, and not some low-grade meat, fraudulently masquerading as something it was not. If labelling is not adequate, then people are being scammed.
But what about fruit and vegetables? References to food quality generally focus on the absence of a defect. The wonky parsnips that were being consigned to landfill because the supermarkets wouldn't buy them, as exposed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, led to a change of policy there after there was a public outcry. Labelling takes account of things like firmness, their ripeness or provenance, and trade bodies exist to uphold claims that a product is organic. But the nutrient density of the food—the number of vitamins and minerals they can tie in to nourish you—is next to never mentioned.
So, to inform this debate, I commissioned a social enterprise called Growing Real Food for Nutrition, acronym Grffn, which is investigating the link between soil quality, growing conditions and optimal production of fruit and veg in the most carbon-neutral way, which is an increasingly serious consideration for us all, given our carbon-reduction targets. I've asked them to test some of the everyday vegetables and fruit available to my constituents, and they visited a farmers' market, a traditional fruit and veg street stall and three well-known supermarket chains on the first Saturday in September. So, fresh fruit and vegetables were bought from all five shops and tested on the same day of purchase using a Brix refractometer. What is a refractometer, you may wonder? It looks a bit like hair-curling tongs, which some of you will be familiar with.