When it comes to food labelling, do we really know what we’re eating? Well, not exactly. Kathleen Griffin looks at the small print

When Smith Klein Beecham claimed on the bottle that Ribena Toothkind ‘does not encourage tooth decay’, the Advertising Standards Authority disagreed. The matter ended up in court and in January, a High Court judge found against Ribena Toothkind, forcing them to remove it from the label.

Misleading labelling affects us all – there are six servings per second of Ribena Toothkind in this country and most of them are to children whose mums and dads think they are being kind to their offspring’s teeth.

So how can we be sure that our supermarket trolley is not full of ingredients we don’t want to eat or drink? And how reliable is the labelling?

If you’re trying not to eat too much sugar, for example, you need to be the Sherlock Holmes of the supermarket aisle. Take the cereal packet I was reading this morning. It was one of those fruit and fibre products with all sorts of stamps on the front – ‘suitable for vegetarians’ (what are they putting in cereal these days?) ‘contains folic acid’, ‘high in fibre’, etc. There were so many goody-goody stamps that there was barely room for the picture of the cereal. Look at the side of the packet, though, and the third ingredient after wheat and raisins is sugar and the seventh is salt.

Manufacturers have to list the ingredients in the size order they appear in the product, so if sugar comes first it means there is more sugar than anything else. Bad news for frozen yoghurt fans. Think you’re being virtuous choosing frozen yoghurt over ice cream? Think again – the first ingredient is sugar.

Disguise is another favourite weapon used by manufacturers to confuse us. Sugar can be called all sorts of scientific sounding names like sucrose, glucose, and so on, so that your favourite sparkling drink, Lucozade turns out to be 26% glucose syrup – sugar, in other words.

Dairy products are another classic example of confusing labelling. Fromage frais comes in handy children sized pots these days, usually with a favourite character like Thomas the Tank Engine plastered on the cover.

But look at the claims on the front of the pots: ‘real fruit purée’ (isn’t that what you expect anyway?), ‘no preservatives,’ ‘no artificial sweeteners’, ‘no colours’. You can be sure that if the competition doesn’t shout their list of no.. no.. no… they’re full of artificial sweeteners, preservatives and colours.

The principle ‘if they don’t deny it, it’s probably there’ is also true for genetically modified products. It’s difficult to avoid because soya and maize turn up in around 80% of processed foods. And while GM soya and maize proteins and flour have to be labelled GM, other ingredients or derivatives don’t. Look out for soya or maize oil, starch, emulsifier, lecithin, glucose, fructose and dextrose as these could be GM too.

Next page: GM, eggs and how to complain

We’re also eating GM because GM crops are fed to farm animals and at the moment there’s no law that food from animals fed on GM crops need to be labelled GM. The simplest way to be sure is to eat organic – though many of the major supermarkets are committed to removing GM.

Sometimes it’s the language that’s misleading. Visit the cooked meat counter and you will see ‘wafer thin ham’ or ‘chicken roll’. But it’s not wafer thin because they have really sharp knives, it’s all the left over bits that have been pressed in a machine, had water added to make them stick together and then sliced. And have you ever seen a chicken round enough to make a roll?

Even a simple egg is a battleground. Egg labelling is voluntary which means there is no standard labelling system. Buy a box of eggs with ‘fresh’ on it - they are almost certainly from a battery hen living in a cage the area of a telephone directory.

‘Barn eggs’ means hens must be loose in the barn with room to scratch, perch and nest but will have no access to the outside. ‘Freerange’ hens have to have daytime access to the outside but who knows what goes into their feed? Organic eggs must be from freerange hens fed with organic feed.

The solution is in our weekly shop, because the supermarkets do listen. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the individual shopper has no power. Remember when they said that organic food would never work? Support organisations like the RSPCA and their Freedom Food range which is guaranteed to meet certain standards of care.

Oh and what should you be giving your kids if you want to make sure their teeth don’t decay? Milk or water. Incidentally, The British Dental Association decided Ribena Toothkind was the first food product they felt happy endorsing. Bizarrely they decided to re-endorse it for another three years beforethe High Court judgement. And though Ribena can no longer claim that Toothkind doesn’t encourage tooth decay – they’ve decided not to appeal the high court decision – they will still have the BDA stamp of approval on the bottle. And they can still call it Toothkind.

Useful Addresses

• www.rspca.co.uk for more information about Freedom foods and genetically modified foods, or call their enquiry line: 0870 333 5999
• www.soilassociation.org has lots of useful information about organic and what it means.
• There’s excellent information on GM foods from www.greenpeace.org.uk/Products/GM

If you want to complain, do so directly to your supermarket, firstly to the manager and then write or email their head office. All the big supermarkets are only too aware of their customer base these days.