Consumed by food

RadioScope: The State We Are In: Consumed Monday, RTÉ Radio 1.

The average Irish dinner is better travelled than the presenter of a holiday programme. Tommy Standún's six-part series, Consumed, RTÉ Radio 1, Monday, revealed that the ingredients of a supermarket meal can travel 24,000 miles before arriving on an Irish dinner plate. It's not just distance that's the problem, food labelling is at best confusing, at worst simply misleading.

So what's a trolley-pushing consumer to do? If listeners to Standún's thought-provoking and well-researched series were hoping for a simple "buy this, don't buy that" guide to food, they would have been disappointed. Standún took an everyday food product and traced it back to where it came from. His technique was forensic and wide ranging, and included examining the American GM grain that is fed to Irish lambs; considering the need for the eight different chemical sprays applied to some potatoes; and questioning the chicken content of the average chicken nugget - it's 30 per cent incidentally. His style throughout was non-directive because, as it slowly emerged over the six weeks as he examined lamb, beef, fruit and veg, chicken, fish, and milk, there is no easy answer.

Standún's investigation into milk in the last programme showed just how complicated the whole business of choosing even the most basic of foodstuffs is.

At a supermarket in the south midlands he picked up a litre of own-brand milk. Own-brand milks can run up to 30 per cent cheaper than the branded versions and on the shelf they look the same, but is one better or worse? Standún didn't offer an opinion; instead he set about finding out exactly where the milk came from.

The sales staff weren't able to tell him and repeated inquiries to head office yielded no information. Difficulty in getting even basic information from retailers was a regular problem throughout the series, prompting Standún to ask: "What have they got to hide?" A friend tipped him off that the milk might be from Donegal - a distance of 530km. It's a long way for a litre of milk to travel in a country that's dotted with dairy farms.

In Derry, a dairy farmer explained how cut-throat the business of producing milk is and how supermarkets wield the sort of power that "literally puts a stranglehold on the processors". He was typical of the farmers interviewed in the series who all emerged as decent, hard working, land and animal loving people trying to do their best but caught up in a food production process over which they ultimately have little control. Yes, the Derry farmer said, his cattle were given veterinary pharmaceuticals when required, but the creameries constantly test for antibiotic residue and, if the tests prove positive, they could refuse to buy the milk. His cattle, he said, were 90 per cent grass fed with the remainder coming from "maybe a little soya". Standún then visited an organic dairy farmer in South Tipperary who said his decision to "go organic" was as much a lifestyle choice as anything else.

Summing up his exploration of the food we eat, Standún said that "the panacea is not to go organic". Consumers, he said, should buy local, whether organic or not, because "the local farmer is the most regulated". As for meat, beef is "theoretically safer than anything else", though consumers get a raw deal when it comes to the catering industry because of the lack of transparency in the origins of some ingredients, particularly chicken. Lastly, he advised people to be more open minded, though still questioning, when it comes to GM or as it is being increasingly known, bio-engineered food - it's in that industry where our future dinners are being concocted.

CORRECTION: Last week's TVScope review of Beaten, Primetime, RTÉ 1 was incorrectly attributed. The review was written by Olive Travers.