The Italian approach to food packaging

The principal of this, apart from clarifying the existing advice, was to address food waste by encouraging use of 'best before' dates on more foods and 'use by' on fewer. When last advised, publication date was scheduled for the end of October 2010. The first consultation paper was published a year ago.

The transfer from the FSA to DEFRA seems out of line with the policy that the FSA should retain responsibility for safety issues. Durability date marking is a safety issue and perhaps progress might have been faster under FSA without the political influence, which in all fairness, started when the Labour DEFRA minister declared war on waste.

However, the situation is now even more confusing. The old guidance notes still appear on the FSA website. The labelling page on the old DEFRA website has three quarters of a page on the importance of the improved durability date guidance and the only other topic on this page is about labelling food from the occupied Palestinian territories a curious juxtaposition. Clicking on a 'further information' link takes you to a corrupted page on an external website, the only readable part of which quotes the late Rose Gray, chef of the River Café, suggesting that we should "follow the Italian way". What she meant wasn't possible to elicit, so we will never know what she was referring to; but it certainly wasn't an explanation of date labels.

So I turned to the internet for inspiration. I found a site called 'Food packaging, the Italian Way' and suddenly I began to imagine what Rose Grey might have meant. The words 'tissue paper', 'functional', 'inexpensive (yet charming)', 'flamboyant and OTT designs', 'hand-written text', 'tied with ribbon', 'tactile', 'bright and elegant', 'a riot of fonts' it made my heart sing and all at once, concern about the lack of date-marking guidance seemed unimportant. And for a moment I felt that we too should be asking DEFRA to support the Italian way in the absence of anything more sensible on its website.

Returning to reality, I rang the Waste & Resources Action Programme, which spearheaded the original campaign to reduce food waste, only to discover that the relevant individuals were out at a meeting on this very subject. The mystery remains

I wonder whether the government might secretly be wishing it had not been so quick to parcel out food labelling responsibilities in a seemingly haphazard way that left even its own website in a quandary as to what belonged where.

Clare Cheney is director general of the Provision Trade Federation