Where Are the Independent Critics?

"In The Politics of Food he [Geoffrey Cannon] shows that the Officially Secret decisions of a closed circle of little-known but powerful people in Whitehall and Westminster, meeting in committees with representatives of the giant food manufacturers, without reference to us or our MPs in Parliament, has [sic] resulted in a national food policy that could he the death of us all.” Hyperbole is an essential tool for the “writers” who compose those stirring constellations of words that appear on the dust jackets of popular science books. Witness the above extract from a wondrous bit of effervescence (“astonishing.. apathetic officials... shocking... controversial...") that is being used to plug nutrition journalist Geoffrey Cannon’s latest best-selling tirade against the food industry and government food policy in Britain. Indeed, whenever Cannon, the former Radio Times editor, himself describes something as merely “regrettable,” we feel almost miffed. In fact, Cannon seldom lets his eager readers down. He clearly has fire aplenty in his soundly nourished belly as he leads readers on the rampage through a morass of deceit, incompetence and infamy. For me, it’s all too much. Despite the author’s approving quotation from something I once wrote about Margaret Thatcher before she became Prime Minister, there’s quite a lot that I dislike about The Politics of Food. Above all, I rebel against the book’s alternately breezy and hectoring style, and by section headings like “Bunfight at the OK Abattoir” and “You’d Be Better Off in Russia” that cheapen even the more fastidiously fashioned pleas for our support in the crusade. Links to Industry All of which is a very great pity, because there is one string to Geoffrey Cannon’s bow of arguments that, although overplayed here, is of major importance to all concerned with the long-term health of our democratic decision-making in science and allied matters. Cannon makes much—arguably too much in terms of individual scientists—of the degree to which commerce permeates the various bodies whose official roles are to advise government ministries on food and health. He discovered (the information had to be ferreted out, rather than being freely available) that about half of the 247 experts chosen to sit on these panels had links with companies whose products were likely to come before them for safety approval. Several members of the key Food Advisory Committee, for example, were paid employees of firms such as Unilever and Heinz. Consultants to industry loomed large among most of the other cabals. Although Cannon was studiously careful not to slur the personal integrity of any of the individuals named in his book, his charges have not been well received by the scientific establishment in Britain. Critics have rebutted them on the reasonable grounds that the U.K. government, indeed any government, would be wise to harness the expertise of the best brains, wherever they happen to be, in formulating food policies. Why, for example, should the world’s most formidable authority on B vitamim be disqualified from public service because he or she is in receipt of private money? Fair point. Yet behind these charges and counter-charges is an uneasy consequence of the financial pressures that have hit the scientific establishments in most Western countries in recent years. Gradually it is becoming more and more difficult to find any totally independent expertise that can be used to question the conventional wisdom on matters concerning science, technology and medicine. In some sectors of biotechnology the sort of unfettered criticism that used to be available in the universities has all but disappeared as campuses, starved of government finance, have forged ever-stronger links with industry. There’s a similar situation in some of the hard technologies. So while in the past academics have come forward with crucially important evidence about problems ranging from nuclear reactor design to the dangers of using antibiotics in animal husbandry, universities today are increasingly losing their traditional role of scholarly independence. Given that ill-founded criticism will invariably emerge in the absence of the more reliable variety in socially contentious fields such as bio and nuclear technology, this is a development that should concern us all. A microbiologist by training, Dixon is European editor of THE SCIENTIST.

Where Are the Independent Critics?

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