Colin Breed MP MP for South East Cornwall, & the Liberal Democrat Shadow Minister for Rural Affairs & Agriculture At a recent forum to discuss food issues I met representatives of the CWS who explained to me their recent initiative concerning what they have dubbed "Food Crimes". The project started with an investigation into consumer attitudes to a whole range of food issues, from production to marketing, which revealed a high level of concern among the public about their food and eating habits ­ and particularly those of their children. The Co-op has often taken a moral lead and its call for a ban on the advertising of fatty, sugary and salty foods during children's viewing hours is laudable. The marketing assault on impressionable children is creating a culture of packaged and processed food, which is not only physically bad for the health of the nation, but is also bad for the economic health of Britain's food producers. For everyone's sake we need to get back to eating natural, home produced food, more or less straight from the farm, with maximum returns back to farmers and maximum dividends to human health. The CWS wants to further these aims, with future campaigns based around limiting artificial ingredients within processed foods and artificial and unnatural inputs at farm levels. Of course, we have to embrace new technologies, but it is quite right someone should force the food industry to step back and examine the overall trends, and consider what we really want. Increasingly we are being force fed a diet, the origins of which are unclear, and the nutritional value of which is limited. One of the most disturbing things to come out of the CWS survey was the number of people who admitted they simply did not want to know where their food had come from or how it was produced. In a modern age where half the neat plastic packaging is covered with writing, to be in a situation when none of it is telling us even the basic information about where the food has come from is simply not good enough. {{NEWS }}