News and Reviews - Tue 23rd Mar 2010
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Tue 23rd Mar 10 Conform or close, head of food agency tells dirty cafés
The new head of a Government agency has warned that food businesses which refuse to conform to a voluntary scheme on hygiene ratings will be closed down by repeated visits from health inspectors. In candid comments to The Independent, Lord Rooker, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, said any pub, café, hotel, restaurant and takeaway not openly displaying its rating under the "scores on the doors" system faced weekly official visits. Rebel firms would have to pay for environmental health inspections themselves, the former Labour minister added, warning they would "go out of business pretty damn quick".
Two-thirds of local authorities in England, 219, currently publish 0- to 5-star hygiene ratings on more than 100,000 outlets on websites available for public scrutiny, and the FSA has spent four years developing its own UK-wide scheme with the aim of reducing the 750,000 people hit by food poisoning every year.
In an interview to mark the first 10 years of the FSA – which he helped found as a minister in the former Ministry of Agriculture in 2000 – Lord Rooker said that all outlets would want to join a national scheme eventually accepted by council and industry bodies.
Asked why dirty premises would want to display low scores, he said: "When we get to that point, they will get inspected every week and charged for it. They will be out of business pretty damn quick, because the regulations will put them out [of business].
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent, the Independent, published 18th March. Read more
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/conform-or-close-head-of-food-agency-tells-dirty-cafs-1923215.html
Tue 23rd Mar 10 'Our love affair with home-grown ingredients is killing innovation in our restaurants'
I'm flying over Russia with Air New Zealand, travelling from Hong Kong, having just had a lovely meal of passion fruit and vodka-cured salmon, followed by braised beef short rib with garlic mash, and a blueberry almond cake.
The dishes are delicious – and exactly what we consider to be a perfectly acceptable meal these days. What I mean by this is that even though it's a mixture of styles, with ingredients from all around the world, it is, simply, food. Yet it is certain kinds of food like this that seem to upset so many chefs and critics. Increasingly, the prime concern is not how well cooked or sourced the ingredients are, but the provenance of the ingredients and the nationality of the person cooking them.
It appears to me that we are now closing culinary ranks in Britain, deciding what we are prepared to accept and what is unacceptable. I have a sense of a growing tide of culinary xenophobia. I'd hazard a guess and suggest that a lot of British chefs and the foodie media are trying desperately to establish a nationalistic culinary legacy such as most European nations (and those from Turkey to Thailand) have had for centuries. And to do this, they have unconsciously set boundaries and rules which say that in this new wave of so-called Britishness, a chef must not experiment by mixing foreign ingredients – at the risk of exclusion from a secret gastronomic club to which so many chefs aspire.
Published in the Independent, 11th March 2010. Read more
