As we talked vices with the head of the Food Standards Agency, it was hard not
to be distracted by two large plates on the desk in front of her. One was
heaped with raw carrot, corn and celery, the other equally ostentatiously
with grapes and pineapple cubes. Dame Deirdre Hutton did not ruin their
alignment by eating from one of them.
“It’s the only job I’ve had where not putting on weight is a key performance
indicator,” she said — and she was not entirely joking.
Dame Deirdre is the woman who polices our increasingly fraught relationship
with food, from warning us against the dietary dangers lurking in a Turkey
Twizzler to reassuring us that it was safe to eat turkey itself in the
latest bird flu outbreak. As the mover behind this week’s announcement of a
ban on advertising junk food to children, and creator of the red, amber and
green “traffic lights” labelling on supermarket food, you could call her the
nation’s Übernanny. Imagine someone with the clipped,
elegant authority of Sue MacGregor, urging you to eat up your greens.
Did she ever treat herself to something naughty but nice? What, according to
her traffic lights system, were the reds in her life? She paused to think.
“I eat muesli sometimes . . .” Muesli? Her sin was muesli?
“The red is not for added sugar,” she said quickly, “it’s for the sugar in
fruit. But fruit’s good for you, so . . .”
She did not eat biscuits, cakes or crisps: “It’s partly the way you are
brought up.”
Chocolate, we press on, cheese? “I love gooey brie,” she conceded. Ah.
“But brie is lower in fat than hard cheese. But again we would not ask for a
label on brie. Yes, of course I eat brie – just not too much.”
Dame Deirdre, razor sharp and, we hardly need add, slim, obviously did not
share Britain’s problems with food —only this week we were told that we had
the fattest women in Europe. But we did have a first impression, and perhaps
it was just her breeding, composure or enviable diet, of her speaking from a
moral high ground.
This was not really true; she ticked us off later for being patronising about
the eating habits of the poor. But it did reflect the problems that some
have had with her work. Many food manufacturers, our biggest supermarket and
the more libertarian consumers have taken issue with her interventions,
saying that people were more savvy than she gave them credit for.
When we presented her with the nanny accusation, her deportment straightened,
her smile tightened. We thought she may have heard this one before.
“Of course, somebody would say that if they wanted to be critical, and it’s a
very convenient sort of tag, isn’t it? I cannot see, I really cannot see,
how you could describe me as a nanny if what I’m trying to do is give Joe
Bloggs the information so that he can make his own choices.
“That’s what we’re doing. It’s not about telling people what to eat. And if
you think about how surprised people are to find out what’s in processed
food, then apparently clearer information is helpful to them.”
Slapped wrist. Yet her next project is the largest national survey of our
eating habits; Dame Deirdre behind all of us in the queue for the till,
peering into our shopping baskets.
This was her idea in response to a schism over food labels. It is hard to
imagine anyone defying Dame Deirdre but Tesco, our biggest supermarket, has,
along with most of the major food manufacturers: Nestlé, Unilever,
Kellogg’s, Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, Danone, Masterfoods, PepsiCo and
Unilever.
They have refused to adopt the Food Standards Agency traffic lights system,
despite independent research showing that it was the one that consumers
preferred. Instead, they have introduced their own labels, leading to a
confusing array of hieroglyphics on food packets.
When we asked Dame Deirdre what possible reason, other than protecting the
profitability of unhealthy foods, Tesco and the rest could have for sticking
to their own system, she demurred.
“I’m not going to be drawn into knocking Tesco, because actually I think the
bigger achievement is that we have got the whole food-labelling industry to
recognise that front-of-pack labelling is important.”
Her tactics are more subtle and ambitious: persuading Tesco and the other
supermarkets to track our shopping behaviour for the next 18 months, to see
which labelling system is best at changing people’s behaviour. “What we’ve
done is engage 55 million UK consumers in the biggest piece of behavioural
research that’s ever been done anywhere in the world,” she said.
“We will get the sales data that comes out of the supermarkets, so effectively
you get everybody. I think it’s terribly exciting and nobody else in the
world has done anything like this.”
The shops will hand over their data to an independent panel, run by the
Government’s chief social scientist, and a winner will be declared. If it
shows that a simple coloured label helps to decide what we put on our plate,
effectively saving lives, the impact could be global.
“I had the Canadian Parliament on the phone the other day, the States are
looking at it waiting for the results, so is the European Union.”
Those that argue that she should be tougher on Tesco and the big food
companies, with public denunciations of the rival scheme, or alternatively
should leave the supermarkets alone, may be interested to know that she has
shares in Tesco and Unilever.
The Food Standards Agency is an independent government body, but if there were
a minister in charge, he or she would probably get rid of any shares in food
companies to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Why not
her? She may be right that it did not matter — but there was that edge in
her voice again.
“Well, you can take that view if you want, but we have rules around
transparency. What I have is there in the public domain. It’s on the
website. So anybody can see it. So it’s not a problem.”
Dame Deirdre served her opinions crisply, unnervingly so. What about the
furore over the rules on banning junk-food advertising during children’s
television programmes? She coolly dismissed the “howls of pain from some
parts of the industry”, which have complained that some healthy products
will be barred. “I’m quite surprised at them, because actually I have never
seen olive oil and Stilton advertised to children anyway — it’s daft, it’s
just crazy.”
She seemed like one of those formidable women who built the Empire — and this
made sense when we found out more about her background. After attending a
pedigree girls’ boarding school, she spent time working in Palestinian
refugee camps and then lived in South Africa, where she was arrested in an
antiapartheid demonstration. As the riot raged around the cathedral in Cape
Town, she managed to get in to sing in the concert that night: “Beethoven’s
Ninth, which, as I’m sure you know, is a hymn to freedom. I don’t think I’ve
sung it in the same way before or since.”
Finally, she returned to her heritage: she comes from a family of
shopping-basket pokers; it was, as she put it, in her lifeblood. Her mother,
a government dietician, created the National Loaf in the Second World War,
substituting white bread with a fortified calcium wholemeal loaf. From an
era of shortages to an era of obesity, the aim – better health – was the
same. Her mother, now 92, looks on fascinated at her daughter’s work.
“When I got here I found there was a photograph of her in the library
downstairs. It was a bit of a shock to find she got here 60 years before I
did,” Dame Deirdre said.
Her mother “thinks it a pity that people don’t cook more”, but compared with
her involvement with rationing and the National Loaf, Dame Deirdre’s efforts
against obesity look positively laissez faire.
“When you’ve got, on the one hand, a quarter of teenagers classified as
overweight or obese and the graph going upwards, and then you’ve got
six-year-olds going on diets and people size 12 thinking they’re too fat —
we have a very odd relationship with food in this country which seems to
operate at both extremes. The implications of people getting fatter and
fatter are actually quite important, and the Government is just waking up to
it. But we can’t regulate for people to be thinner.”
Freedom, to her, is not leaving people alone but educating them. “If you’re
going to make something work on a voluntary basis it means you’ve had to win
hearts and minds, and hearts and minds usually in the end works better than
regulation.”
Or as she put it as we cleared up at the end of the interview: “If you think
about it, you have regulation where there’s market failure. One of the
reasons for market failure is because consumers don’t have the right
information.” Yep, that was the small talk as we tucked into the grapes.
Some consumers will keep doing things that are bad for them, no matter how
much information you give them. Is more information helpful or bossy?
Liberating or stifling? Let Dame Deirdre know what you think when you next
go shopping. She’s going to find out anyway.
Career ingredients
Born March 15, 1949
Educated Sherborne School for Girls
Family Married; one son a research chemist at Tate & Lyle, the
other a researcher to an MP
Past employment Includes chairing the National Consumer Council,
2001-05, the Scottish Consumer Council, the Food Chain Centre, the Personal
Investment Authority Ombudsman Bureau and the Foresight Panel on the Food
Chain and Crops for Industry; vice-chairwoman of the Scottish Environmental
Protection Agency; member of the Better Regulation Taskforce
Current jobs Chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency; deputy chairwoman
of the Financial Services Authority and the European Food Safety Authority;
trustee to the Picker Institute
Hobby Chamber music
