Not On The Label

By Felicity Lawrence

Book Overview

This is a shocking and highly readable expose of the state of the food production industry in Britain today. Felicity Lawrence will take some of the most popular foods we eat at home to show how the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0141015667
• ISBN13: 9780141015668
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Penguin UK
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.7" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

An essential read

The best investment you can make for your family's / personal health. Please read it, and pass around those who are near and dear to you. It's an outrage what supermarkets are stealthily encouraging within our supposed 'food chain'. Legal adulteration makes most of what we eat seem like pure imitation food. And it is. This books exposes much of what is hidden to the consumer. An excellent read.

Educate yourself on what you eat - a book of valuable information

This book is an eye opening account of modern food manufacturing practices. A quiet revolution has taken place over the last 20 years in how food is manufactured and delivered to our supermarkets and tables. It is travelling greater distances and in many cases is more highly refined and full of additives than it was in the past. How many of us actually understand the contents we see on food labels when we read them? This ignorance of both the contents of the food we eat and the health impact of a continuous stream of these additives is something manufacturers rely on for us to buy modern, glossy looking, food. This book details some horrifying manufacturing practices involved in everyday food such as bread, chicken, Lettuce etc. The old saying "you are what you eat" has never been truer you realise as you read this book. This book details modern methods used principally in the UK and Europe, but the same food practices are used the world over now. It also pinpoints issues such as the vast amount of power supermarkets wield over food suppliers both in price and their insatiable demands for cosmetic perfection in the goods they sell, when then fuels a vicious cycle of underpaid agricultural workers and an unscrupulous reliance on adulteration of manufactured food and a high use of steroids and fertilizers on the farm. If you care at all about the quality of the food you eat and the impacts of modern food adulteration on your health this investigative journalists book is one you should read. It'll change how you view what you see when you go to the supermarket.

"What really goes into the food on your plate"

The title of this review is the subtitle used by Mrs Lawrence for her book. And indeed readers will discover some harrowing facts about the way the industry processes our everyday food. If you don't know what mechanically recovered meat is, how chickens are raised in Brazil, that when you order chicken in a restaurant you may in fact be eating 30% beef, that a farm is no longer a place where food is grown but an industrial complex of packing sheds around lorry parks or that the conditions under which illegal immigrants pick fruit and vegetables in Spain can be compared to "South African apartheid". The author visited a giant refrigerated packing plant near Aylesford which reminded her of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"! Did you know that a standard shopping basket in a supermarket with 20 fresh foods represents an average accumulation of 100 000 "food miles"? One example: the mangetout or asparagus from Peru you buy have a journey of 6312 miles behind them... Or that 60% of the factory bread consumed in Britain is produced by plants belonging to two giants - who call themselves "bakeries" - British Bakeries and Allied Bakeries? Well Mrs Lawrence has plenty of examples in store in her study which will surprise many a reader about the way our modern food is manufactured and processed. In the same vein, readers may also be interested in Joanna Blythman's very instructive discussion of supermarket policies in her book "Shopped".