Meeting of the Parliament 09 December 2014
I am grateful for that reassurance.
I will turn quickly to the public health role of FSS, which was touched on by Claire Baker. It is important that it will have that role, although we will have to see how it is developed. We are keen to see how it will interact with other public health roles in the national health service and so on. It is important that we look at public health. Richard Simpson talked about the increase in type 2 diabetes, which is enormous and needs to be tackled, and Claire Baker asked whether we should be a good diet nation rather than a good food nation.
I admit that I was one of those who took the culinary tour of the Highlands and Islands during the food debate a couple of weeks ago, and Jackson Carlaw continued that today with his promotion of tattie scones from his local baker. However, while we promote what is good—there is the old adage that a little of what you fancy does you good—we need to look at how we tackle obesity, especially childhood obesity, as well as people’s knowledge of nutrition. We get a lot of nutrition information on packaging, but it is not always understood that a child’s nutritional needs are quite different from an adult’s nutritional needs. We need to do more to promote that distinction on food labelling. Indeed, some of the food that is designed for children is loaded with sugar, which is not very good for them.
We need to think about how food is promoted and packaged; labelling plays an important role in that. Part of food standards Scotland’s remit will be to ensure that food is labelled properly and gives the right advice. It must be consistent with labelling in the rest of the United Kingdom and in line with EU legislation as well as legislation for other markets, because we want our produce to be sold further afield, but it is important that food labelling advises people what they should eat—in addressing imported foods from other parts of the world, Richard Simpson talked about antibiotics, additives and the like. We need to ensure that food labelling does all that, as well as promoting our food.
Food standards Scotland will help us to continue to build on the excellence that we have in the Scottish food industry. I hope that, at its heart, it will protect consumers but will also promote excellence within our industry.
15:39