The UK Government should set limits on the levels and types of PFAS permitted in food, giving producers, retailers and regulators a consistent basis for protecting public health, said the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) this week as it published its report: ‘Addressing the risks from Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS).’
These are the forever chemicals that seem to be making headlines persistently of late, as their negative impacts on the environment, biodiversity and human health become clearer. “We do not need to panic, but we do need to take sensible precautions,” said EAC chair Toby Perkins.
PFAS are a group of 10,000 industrial chemicals used in everyday items like cookware, grease-resistant food packaging and waterproof clothing. They have brought considerable benefits but their drawbacks are becoming harder to swallow.
Studies have found high levels of these harmful and persistent chemicals in food-to-go packaging, including the compostable packaging that has rapidly been replacing fossil-fuel-based plastics across our high-streets. The Food Packaging Forum has estimated that at least 268 PFAS could be used in food contact materials (FCMs), and of the 1,222 hazardous FCMs, at least 44 are PFAS.
They are also used in pesticides, and have been found distributed through sewage sludge that is spread to fields, exposing both farmers and the food chain. “The evidence is more than conclusive – PFAS [are] a serious and enduring threat to our environment and health,” Lindsey Hendricks-Franco, fellow at the Ecologic Institut, based in Berlin, said recently. “Continuing [to bend] to the short-term bottom line of the pesticide, packaging and cookware industries is unconscionable.”
In February, the UK Government published a PFAS plan. It was widely derided by NGOs as a “plan to nowhere”, focusing on yet more research and monitoring. MPs on the EAC seemed to concur: “It appears to be a plan to eventually have a plan, rather than a concrete set of commitments to reduce and remediate PFAS.”
According to the Institution for Mechanical Engineering, the pathways through which PFAS enter drinking water and the wider food chain are not well understood. Still, this appears to be a ticking timebomb and an example of where the precautionary principle might sensibly be applied. “The smart companies are the ones who have been working on this for the past decade to phase these chemicals out,” FPF chief scientific officer Jane Muncke told Footprint.
Substitutes are available, including for packaging and pesticides. Whether the UK Government – as the EU is preparing to do – will force companies to use them is unclear. Regulation and assessment of new PFAS also needs to improve dramatically, suggested the EAC, as the committee called on ministers to establish and monitor limits on PFAS entering the food chain through agricultural processes.
In Switzerland, there is support for more testing and potential sales bans after the presence of the chemicals above legal limits was detected in some Swiss beef cattle (one mooted solution is to ‘dilute’ the meat with beef from other areas).
“Other nations in Europe have already taken stronger steps to ban PFAS than we have in the UK,” the EAC said. “We risk our citizens and environment continuing to have greater exposure than our European counterparts if we fail to catch up.”
Footprint will next month be publishing a deeper dive into PFAS and the impact on foodservice companies of growing regulatory scrutiny.
Small Bites
GLP-1s suppressing appetite for out-of-home visits
The proportion of UK adults on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs stood at 6% in March, almost double the level of nine months earlier (3.1%), according to polling by UK grocery analysts at the IGD. The findings, in the first quarterly report from the ‘IGD Futures: GLP-1 insight programme’, also showed worrying trends for foodservice: 41% of those taking the appetite-suppressing drugs go out to eat less frequently; 47% make fewer visits to coffee shops and sandwich bars; and 30% drink less alcohol (which results in some users socialising less often). When they do eat out, portions are frequently shared or taken home. Some “actively time their injections to allow for a greater appetite at weekends”, but the rub is that overall frequency and spend are down. Caroline Young, shopper insights manager at IGD, said “smaller portions, lighter menus, protein‑rich dishes and flexible formats” could help operators future‑proof menus for their growing GLP‑1 audiences. Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Bramble Partners and Leon restaurants and author of the National Food Strategy for England, has described GLP-1 weight-loss drugs as one of six forces that have left food companies facing a decade of disruption.
When grass-fed isn’t greener
Dairy firm Fonterra has admitted that its marketing of “100% New Zealand grass-fed” butter was misleading. The firm’s cows can be fed up to 20% imported palm kernel expeller (PKE), according to a legal challenge made by Greenpeace Aotearoa. “This is an open-and-shut case of greenwashing,” said the NGO’s spokesperson Sinéad Deighton-O’Flynn, who highlighted the “notoriously murky supply chains” of PKE, some of which have been linked to illegal deforestation in Indonesia’s Rawa Singkil Wildlife reserve. The claim, brought under New Zealand’s Fair Trading Act and settled out of court, is notable as the term grass-fed increasingly appears on packaging, menus and in ESG reports (where it is often linked to regenerative agriculture practices). In the UK, ‘grass-fed’ can be applied to animals that have been raised on as little as 51% grass, with the rest of their diet supplemented with grains, imported soya, or food waste products. The Advertising Standards Authority’s rules on marketing of farming methods do however warn companies that they “must ensure that they hold documentary evidence to prove all claims, whether direct or implied, that are capable of objective substantiation” and also “take care to avoid any implied claims through imagery or wording […] as they may be taken by consumers as direct claims about the farming or welfare of the animals”.
Prison food with purpose
An initiative in New York is exploring how food can be used to promote better health outcomes among prisoner populations. The New York City Food Policy Centre and the Correctional Association of New York have launched a new partnership to improve food access, quality and nutritional standards across New York’s correctional facilities. “This marks a significant step toward addressing the intersection of public health, food justice and the rights and well-being of incarcerated individuals,” the organisations said in a statement. The plan is to better understand how food functions within institutional settings and “how it can be leveraged to promote better health outcomes and long-term equity”. The two organisations hope to “shine a light” on the oft-overlooked role of food within correctional environments and to “advance a more comprehensive understanding of how food policies impact physical health, mental well-being, dignity, and broader re-entry outcomes for incarcerated people”. They said the partnership “recognises that food is not simply a matter of sustenance, but a critical component of public health infrastructure and a powerful lens through which systemic inequities can be examined and addressed”. Their work will also serve as a platform for those involved in efforts to improve prison food.
Chef’s Special
What is the carbon footprint of a fine-diner? That’s the question researchers from Brunel University London and University of London set out to answer. The figure they ended up with was 5.87kgCO2e per guest, according to an analysis of 6,282 individual food purchases across a 12-month period in a “sizeable fine-dining restaurant”. This exceeds the emissions ‘allowance’ set out in the Eatwell Guide. Meat, inevitably, and fish, were the major contributors (though dark chocolate also registered in the top 10 categories with the highest emissions). Food waste ranked fourth, behind only beef, lamb/mutton and chicken. The analysis, published in the journal Cleaner Food Systems, also included procurement data on inedible animal products like bones and shells that are used for stock, which could have increased the footprint slightly. Guests at the restaurant ate more than the ‘average meal’ by weight used in calculations by the likes of Wrap, as well as a wider variety of livestock proteins, both of which could also explain the high emissions. The meats provided the most “uncertainty” in relation to specific footprints due to a lack of data. The experts also discovered an “empirical gap for UK SME catering businesses” in relation to scope 3 emissions.
Last Orders
The average weight of a bottle of still wine has fallen from 550g in 2023 to 430g, just shy of the 420g target this year under the Sustainable Wine Roundtable’s Bottle Weight Accord (BWA). The accord, which brings together 20 leading wine companies, covering more than 2.5 billion bottles (or around 9% of global wine sales), has published its latest annual report, which also showed members have helped mitigate an estimated 440,000 tonnes of CO2e in the past two years, “demonstrating the power of industry collaboration to deliver sustainability impact at scale”. When the BWA was launched in 2023 the main driver for those joining it was to reduce carbon emissions, but the introduction of extended producer responsibility for packaging (pEPR) in the UK – and the likely introduction of similar levies in other countries – has provided an additional rationale for lightweighting, namely cost reduction. Lightweighting of the bottles has resulted in none of the consumer backlash some had predicted, with research showing an “indifference to bottle weight”. Further lightweighting is possible, with McGuigan Wines about to roll out a 300g Burgundy bottle, expected to cut emissions from glass production alone by 82ktCO2e a year.
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