Maurice Hanssen – E for Additives (страница 7)
Smoked fish is another loophole. Fish can be called ‘smoked’ when all that has happened is that they have been dipped in a liquid smoke flavour and then artificially coloured! Indeed, smoked and cured fish which is not packed ready for the consumer, like ham, just has to say ‘added permitted colour’, but if it is pre-packed the full declaration is required.
Consumer choice means the freedom to make an informed choice and although we think that the use of these artificial and natural additives in animal feeds presents no toxic hazard to the consumer, we do believe that we have a right, as is the case with eggs in the United States, to know what pigments have been added. In addition, acceptable and legally controlled levels of daily intake should be established and enforced. If the egg regulations are so changed, it would be a good opportunity to label egg boxes with the date the eggs were laid and not the less useful date of packing.
Food has been coloured since ancient times. The Romans coloured bread and wine both with ‘white earth’ and berries. When Britain first imported that rare luxury, sugar, in the twelfth century, the pink- and violet-coloured sugars of Alexandria were, according to John Wallford,1 great favourites. Tyrian purple (from sea snails), madder (from the roots of a herb) and kermes (from a scale insect) are thought to have provided the varying shades of this part of the spectrum.
The red colour of cochineal (E120), was used at least as early as the tenth century by the Toltecs and then the Aztecs of Central America and, as with Egypt and the Mediterranean countries, where the same dyes were used for cloth and for food, it is most likely that cochineal was a food colour.
Many years ago at social meetings of food chemists and before we were in the least worried about the possibility that sweets could rot the teeth (or to be more precise feed the bacteria that do that dark deed), the manufacturers of
By the same token, colour can influence us into thinking that inferior food that looks attractive also tastes good and is, no doubt, good for us.
Probably the most widely quoted and, in our view, illogical test of the response of the consumer to colour was undertaken by Dr Nathan Goldenberg of Marks & Spencer following certain complaints that their tinned peas were an artificial shade of green and the strawberry jam was an unnatural red. The colours were removed and the peas became grey/green and the strawberries red/brown. The customers stopped buying and it took a long time with the colours restored to bring back lost sales. The reason why this test was so pointless and inconclusive is that there was no clear explanation to the customers as to why the changes had happened and what they might expect when they took the product home. Today we have a completely different situation where very many manufacturers have taken the green colour out of peas and the red out of strawberry jam and have suffered no loss of sales. This seems to show that, with information and education, we can change our perception as to what looks good and tasty.
Added colour is like a cosmetic Like all cosmetics colours can improve the appearance delight the onlooker and deceive the senses. Added colours are not necessary, they are a matter of choice The author had a letter published in
The Functions of Colours
Colours have well defined food functions:
(a) to reinforce colours introduced into foods by their ingredients but where, without added colouring matter, the colour imparted to the final food by those ingredients would be weaker than the colour the consumer will associate with the food of that type of flavour (e.g. soft drinks, fruit yogurts, pickles and sauces);
(b) to ensure uniformity of colour from batch to batch where ingredients of varying colour intensity have been used (e.g. jams in transparent containers where the customer can compare like with like in the shop);
(c) to restore something of the food’s original appearance in those cases where the natural colours have been destroyed by heat processing and subsequent storage (e.g. peas, beans, strawberries and raspberries), or bleached out by the use of preservatives (e.g. fruit preservatives, sulphur dioxide for jammaking out of season), or are not light-stable during prolonged storage (e.g. soft drinks);
(d) to give colour to foods which otherwise would be virtually colourless (e.g. boiled sweets, instant desserts, ice lollies).
‘Need’ is an essential reason for deciding that a food additive be used. It could be argued that a reasonable response to at least most of the four categories above would be ‘needed by whom?’. It is clear that in many cases it is the manufacturer that needs the colour, but as we see the removal of many of the artificial colours from the shelves of our shops it is obvious that more colours are being permitted than are ‘needed’ by many responsible manufacturers and retailers, and that these are certainly not demanded by us when we have the choice.
Artificial Colours
In the middle of the last century almost anything that gave colour was used to make food products more attractive. Substances containing mercury, lead, cyanide and copper were frequently used. At about the same time in 1856 Sir William Henry Perkin discovered his first ‘coal tar dye’, which was aniline purple, when he was only nineteen years old. Perkin transformed the cloth industry, whilst at the same time a selection of his colours, which faded less, had a wide range of bright hues and was cheap to use, became available for the food producers.
It did not take long for the regulatory authorities around the world to wonder about some of the colours being used and, depending on where you were, they were either negatively listed, which is to say banned, or positively listed, which means that you could only use those which the government felt were both suitable and harmless according to the scientific standards of the age.
In Britain in 1925 a number of colours which were obviously harmful were banned from use. These included any compounds of antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc, also one vegetable colour, gamboge (much used by painters), and five of the ‘coal tar’ colours—picric acid, Victoria yellow, aurine, Manchester yellow and aurantia.
It was not until 1954 that the Food Standards Committee proposed that there should be a list of acceptable colours instead of just a list of those that were not permitted. Accordingly, in both 1957 and 1973 lists of both natural and synthetic colours that were permitted were prepared. So what is the position today? Britain permits more artificial colours than almost any other western country. If Norway can manage without any artificial colours and the United States allows seven, we have to wonder why we permit sixteen.
It must be said that some of them seem to cause very few problems, even in those people who suffer from many allergies and intolerances. The toxicological questions and allergic reactions occur most frequently with E110, sunset yellow, and the yellow colour E102, tartrazine. This could be because they are used quite often. More research is needed, but that which is being undertaken at the moment seems to ignore the well-established fact that many people are allergic or badly affected by both foods and food additives, and that often the combination of the food and the food additive together is worse than either alone.
The 1987 FAC Report has certainly made one major step forward, and that is to give proposed average daily intake upper levels for a number of the colours under review. Very many problems with foods and food additives are related to dose and an effort to reduce the level is welcome. However, the FAC has not looked at the question of need from the consumer’s point of view and this could well be an area where the reader will wish to form a personal opinion.