Letter To Dame Deirdre Hutton

 

She is the chairman of the Food Standards Agency and appeared on the Simon Mayo show on Radio 5 Live.

This is the letter I wrote to her.

Issues for Coeliacs

I am a coeliac and not a sufferer of coeliac disease, as properly handled it is very much a non-illness and an intolerance.

I heard you yesterday on the Simon Mayo program and was generally impressed with your answers on the work of your Agency. On a personal point of view, as an engineer/scientist and statistician, I’m not impressed with the Tesco labelling system and feel your proposal is best. (I had one of their healthy option pies and quite frankly it had more salt in it than the Dead Sea! They know that salt sells and I know I don’t like it. I also have gall-stones.)

I am a moderator of a lively group of several hundred on coeliac disease on Yahoo and one topic has dominated over the last few weeks. That is the fact that the Codex standard allows 200 ppm of gluten. This means that if you have two slices of toast, you’re eating a lump of gluten the size of the average aspirin. (It doesn’t bother me, as with few exceptions gluten-free bread is total crap and only marginally more tasty than cardboard. I’m on a Marie Antoinette diet where I eat cake.) So please can you reduce that limit to at least 20 ppm as it is in Australia or the USA.

I also was worried about your reply on Simon’s program as to labelling for allergies. It should be compulsory for all allergens to be named on the packaging. Anything less is totally unacceptable. Marks and Spencer are leading the way here and actually name both gluten and wheat separately.

Remember that according to serious studies coeliacs are one in a hundred of the population. Even if many have not been diagnosed!

It will be interesting to see the reply.