Standard bearer
Robert Rees is a chef with a passionate commitment to promoting this industry as much as his own kitchen. He is also a chef whose thoughts will, before long, be exerting an influence on a great many chefs, restaurants and kitchens.
He will achieve this not with his cooking, but with his ideas of how the catering industry should handle, treat and label the food it provides - Rees is the sole caterer on the management board of the Food Standards Agency.
Under the Food Standards Act passed in November last year, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has the job of protecting consumer interests in relation to food safety and standards. Its gestation period began towards the end of the Conservative administration in 1997 as a response to the BSE crisis and more general public disquiet on the lack of safety controls on food, and was immediately picked up by the incoming Labour Government.
After three years of consultation and deliberation, during which ideas such as compulsory registration and registration fees for food premises came and went, the FSA came to life on 3 April this year.
It is funded by, but claiming to be independent of, Government. Its task is to give advice to everyone involved in the food chain, from farm gate to plate, both out-of-home and in-home. But, while advice and education are the surface aims of the FSA, some of its recommendations are likely to slip into future legislation, either in the UK or on a wider front through EU legislation out of Brussels - particularly if the FSA comes to believe that a voluntary code is not working.
To put the task in the simplest terms, the FSA wants to make sure that customers know the deep secrets of the food they are eating, through good labelling and the assurance that all food on the plate has been prepared safely.
While it is a centrally funded body, the Government did not want to have a food safety agency run exclusively by one faction in the food chain, either producer or vendor. To ensure this, the personnel of the FSA management board is an eclectic collection ranging from academics to scientists, including a charity worker, a retired gas sales executive and Rees as the solitary chef.
Supporting the 14-strong management board are 600 civil servants, mostly recruited from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and from the Ministry of Health. The management board meets once a month to listen to what the civil servants have to say, to consider their own research and what lobbying they have had from industry and public, and then to give their opinion, with the aim of influencing Government thinking and actions.
Robert Rees
1984-87 Westminster College
1987 Royal Crescent, Bath, first commis
1989 Le Gavroche, London, premier commis
1991 Royal Crescent, Bath, chef de partie
1992 Hyatt Regency, Cayman Islands, junior chef
1993 Bath Spa, chef tournant
1995 head chef at Splinters restaurant, Christchurch, Dorset
1996 Opened own restaurant, Country Elephant, in Painswick, Gloucestershire
1999 Sold restaurant and started upmarket outside catering company
2000 December: opening new restaurant in Stroud, Gloucestershire
As the sole catering member of the ruling body of the FSA, Robert Rees is frank about his reasons for applying for membership and how his application succeeded. "I've a passion for quality in food and living in a rural area," he says. "The farming side of things is also important to me. I'm a great believer in the education side of the business - not just in telling customers in the restaurant what we are doing, but going into schools and telling kids about good food."
Working in schools is something Rees has done for many years. In his local Gloucestershire schools, he has brought in a scheme to reintroduce food learning by integrating it with literacy and numeracy.
As an occasional guest teacher, he has used a kitchen environment to develop numeracy through costing out shopping lists and seeing how the cost of the shopping basket can be reduced through buying cheaper seasonal produce. Literacy is helped through reading menus the children create themselves from food which is healthy and best-value.
Another scheme he is involved in with Gloucestershire schools is at Maidenhill School in Stonehouse, where he helps run a GCSE course in catering, creating a theoretical restaurant where the children have to plan and execute every element of running a restaurant. "It gets them enthusiastic about this industry," he says. "This is what we should be doing - going into schools and teaching kids about good food, nutrition and catering in a fun way."
Rees has good evidence of the success of this GCSE scheme. Last year, of the 16 young people doing the course, six have now started work in the catering industry.
To get a place on the FSA, Rees responded to an advertisement in the press and made a submission before an interviewing panel on what he thought the role of the FSA should be and what he could bring to its governing body. He has a three-year contract with the FSA, for which he is paid £8,000 a year for three days' work each month.
While Rees has been committed to good food and good practices in the catering industry for many years, he admits to having had to learn a great deal very quickly in order to understand not just good working practices but existing food and hygiene legislation - from both central Government and the EU - and its effect on the catering industry.
"What we are trying to do, above all else, is to get more consumer confidence in food - and British food in particular," he says. "We are consumer-led, not industry-led. I hear these criticisms that we are just another talking shop with no teeth, but we've done a lot in a short time and there is a lot still to happen. The FSA is doing things which will bring practical benefit to the industry."
Among the body's short-term goals has been to tell all local authorities in the UK that it wants to see a standardised system of assessment and inspection of catering premises by environmental health officers (EHOs). The FSA wants to see an end to the current inconsistency of an officer in one borough not accepting something with which the EHO in the next borough is quite happy.
A consultative framework document has been circulated by the FSA to all local authorities and their comments are due back in September. This, it is hoped, will result in a nationalised EHO audit system of assessment and monitoring being implemented by April next year.
Hazard Analysis, Critical Control Points (HACCP) is now widely accepted as the best way of ensuring safe food handling and demonstrating due diligence should anything go wrong, but there is widespread confusion about what it means and there are no guidelines or legislation to support it. A clearer understanding of what HACCP means and how it should be implemented in the catering industry is currently the goal of an FSA task force, with members drawn not just from the FSA itself but with two co-opted catering industry people: Nick Buckingham, for many years head chef at the Cavendish hotel in Baslow, Derbyshire, and Ian McKerracher, chief executive of the Restaurant Association.
The FSA is not in the business of introducing legislation for legislation's sake, says Rees, but, on HACCP, he warns that legislation may well come in the future, probably as an EU Directive. "But that doesn't mean we are going to have licensing of food premises," he says. "That is definitely not on the agenda. With 300,000 catering outlets in Britain, it would be unenforceable."
FSA board members
The 14-member board of the FSA is led by chairman Sir John Krebs, a professor of zoology at Oxford University. With him are deputy chairman Suzi Leather, a freelance researcher and writer on consumer food issues, Sir John Arbuthnott, principal of Strathclyde University, and Michael Gibson, managing director of the family-owned Macbeath's Butchers.
The rest of the board are: Anne Hemingway, who retired in April from her post as head of sales (home energy) for British Gas; Michael Walker, partner in a firm of analytical chemists; Richard Ayre, former deputy chief executive of BBC News; Karol Bailey, a tenant farmer from Cheshire; Jeya Henry, professor of human nutrition at Oxford Brookes University; Valerie Howarth, chief executive of the charity Childline; Robert Rees; Dr Bhupinder Sandu, paediatrician at the Royal Bristol Hospital; Vernon Sankey, chairman of Thomson Travel Group; and Gurbux Singh, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality.
Clear menu labelling is another area at which the FSA is looking closely, particularly concerning potentially harmful but hidden ingredients such as peanuts and GM foods. The incidence of food allergy is growing at an alarming rate, says Rees. "One person in 200 suffers from a peanut allergy," he notes. "You can't ignore that. Labelling at the moment is vague - things like, ‘This product may contain peanuts.' What use is that to someone who would get an attack from just a trace of peanut?"
It's not just peanut warnings the FSA wants to see on menus. There are other hidden items, such as shellfish, which can also cause a severe allergic reaction in some customers. Is Rees suggesting that a menu listing coquilles St Jacques should carry the warning: "This product contains shellfish"? He replies: "I know it sounds silly to us, but you just can't assume that everybody who sits down to read a menu knows what is in coquilles St Jacques."
Saying this, Rees strays into an area where there has been some harsh criticism of the FSA. Edwin Cheeseman, owner of the Fitzwilliam Arms in Castor, Cambridgeshire, and a founder of the small, but vocal, pressure group Campaign for Real Food (CRF) - which promotes fresh British ingredients and in-house cooking - believes that talk of action by the FSA on behalf of consumers has so far been just that - talk.
Cheeseman, who unsuccessfully applied for a place on the FSA board, was part of a delegation from the CRF who recently went to meet the FSA. They wanted to see what common ground there was between them, and also to complain about passing-off on menus of food described as home-made which had been bought in ready-made and reheated.
After a two-hour meeting, Cheeseman says that he and his colleagues left disillusioned. "I got the impression they had no idea what they were doing, why they were there and what they will do in the future," he says. "The agency was set up to do something, but has not been given the plot yet."
He continues: "Clear labelling on food is one of the things they say they are going to tackle, so why don't they [the FSA] want to do something about this passing-off? Some of this food produced in factories is very good, so why don't restaurants do what supermarkets do, and put it all on display in the freezer cabinet with a sign that says, ‘Pick what you want and we'll heat it up for you and put it on a plate'? That's what I think clear labelling is all about. But they said that's up to the local trading standards, not them." Cheeseman concludes: "As far as the FSA goes, the word ‘underwhelmed' comes to mind."
Web site: www.foodstandards.gov.uk
