ABSTRACT
The background to the study reported here was the observation that some concerns about the health-related properties and safety of foods receive widespread publicity in the mass media and appear to influence the public’s buying and eating habits. Meanwhile, the health and safety risks of other food products, with perhaps greater consequences for human health in the long run, seem to receive comparatively little coverage and not to influence food buying and eating patterns in so marked a fashion. For instance, Figure 14.1 shows marked peaks in press reporting of salmonella enteritidis and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the UK. In December 1988, the junior health minister, Edwina Currie, said on ITN news that ‘most of the egg production of this country, sadly, is now infected with salmonella’ (ITN 1700,3 December 1988). Egg sales fell by up to 50 per cent following this widely reported statement, and were still only around 75 per cent of earlier levels by early 1989 (Mintel 1990; Commons Agriculture Committee 1989). Beef sales fell by 20 per cent between May and August 1990, following massive publicity about the possible risk to human health (Spencer 1990). The risks of salmonella in eggs and chicken had been well known for some time, so why did such extensive media coverage arise at that particular time? And why did this apparently cause a dramatic downturn in the buying and eating of eggs among the general public, when ‘health warnings’ about the link between eating eggs, cholesterol and coronary heart disease (the dietary hypothesis) did not appear to have had similar effects (Davison 1989)?
