By Mary Collins and Sue Freeman

The packet of shredded suet looked good enough. It was to have been part of a bread pudding…. Until the shreds started shrugging around. Out went the whole lot, maggots and all. Just one more case of uneatable rubbish being sold instead of food.

Another of the horror stories from the stores.

Now a Public Health inspector has found out what every housewife has to put up with in too many supermarkets and shops. But whereas she is too busy with other household affairs to send the goods back to the manufacturers, he has been able to compile a report. And he found that 22 out of 32 food shops in his town were selling goods more fit for the dustbin than the table!! He was able to go through his purchases and he found no fewer than 240 packets of stale cakes hiding under there bright shiny wrappers.

Mouldy

But the housewife Is buying for the family not researching for the nation and she cannot see why every manufacturer should not follow the system of date stamps as used for example on vacuum packed bacon packages.

The secret code system that manufacturers apply for their own eyes only sometimes even beats the experts. We cannot tell whether the food is fresh and safe for a family to eat until it is unpacked said a spokesman for the 5,500 strong association of Public Health Inspectors “And then unless it smells obviously mouldy. We won’t know until the whole family has gone down with stomach upsets.”

Upsets and that can mean fatal food poisoning in the case of old people and serious illness for children can be avoided when the food is obviously bad. And of course the manufacturers will refund your money when you complain …

But why should we have to waste time asking for refunds on top of the hours spent in queues to buy the products? Why should stretching out the house keeping money be turned into a Russian roulette of the kitchen?

The food manufacturers claim that date labelling would simply send the food prices rocketing by 40 per cent.

They claim that housewives would always choose the freshest and therefore masses of perfectly good food would soon be out of date and wasted. Walls,the sausage and pie makers claim “If a pie was kept in a modern supermarket it would remain fresh for a number of days, but not if it was put in a shop window under the sun.”

“So as we have no control over what shops do with our food, how can we date label any, except those which are vacuum packed and stay fresh until opened?”

But aren’t food manufacturers crediting the housewife with too little shopping sense? Of course she wants, and has a right to the freshest food, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t take the manufacturers word and happily buy within the date limit, without searching only for the item that was packed the day before. And she is hardly likely to put the blame on a manufacturer if she finds her local grocery shop keeping food in conditions where it couldn’t possibly last.

Rosemary McRobert of the consumers association said “food manufacturers have a grandfatherly attitude towards housewives by which they believe that there is certain information they should not be trusted with, “but we believe that the housewife has the right to date labelling of all food. It’s not fair to put all the responsibility on the retailer especially when he often has no way of knowing himself that packaged food is fresh.”

Change

A government committee now looking into date labelling of foodstuffs  expects to be pondering the question for another year. Then it could take two or three more years before any change in law came into effect.

Does the housewife have to wait that long for a fair deal???