Life & Society
NS interview - Ed Mayo
Published 18 July 2005
Jamie Oliver is a candidate for sainthood, says the chief executive of the National Consumer Council. And his kids agree. Ed Mayo interviewed
Ed Mayo's children must be nice people. During half-term, as a child I was taken into my lecturer dad's office where I wrote, in permanent marker on his whiteboard, "Howard's students are stupid." Ed Mayo's children, however, have been far kinder. "Ed is the best dad in the world," one of them has written.
Above that, in slightly neater handwriting, is even more praise, this time from Alan Knight, a commissioner at the Sustainable Development Commission: "Ed is the best sustainable consumption co-chair in the world!"
High praise indeed, on both counts. It is probably through his children, however, rather than his work on sustainable consumption, that the chief executive of the National Consumer Council keeps in touch with the food issues that affect young people. "Anybody who has watched children's TV on a Saturday morning, or at other times, will be shocked by the sheer scale of the bombardment and sophistication of marketing and advertising to children of junk food," says Mayo. Consequently, he is passionately in favour of restricting this, something that should be relatively easy to implement. "Advertising controls already exist in relation to alcohol and tobacco, so it is quite possible to tighten those controls and apply them to junk food. It doesn't require new legislation to make it happen."
This is not a puritanical approach. Mayo does not claim that he never succumbs himself. "I think most consumers understand that health is not a cross to bear," he says. "We all like a packet of crisps, many of us like a fag. All of these things we can enjoy." But he does believe in making it easier for consumers to make healthy choices. He believes that with regards to children, this means taking three steps: "First we need to limit the sheer volume of adverts for junk food targeted at children. The current codes look at each advert in turn but they don't address the cumulative effect of marketing to children. Second, we need to restrict the use of cartoon characters when advertising foods. We know that children, particularly tweens [eight- to 12-year-olds] look to cartoon characters and are influenced by them, so it's particularly damaging to use them to target such young children. The third is the appropriate use of celebrities. It does seem strange to promote junk food through people that children look up to in society, whether that is ex-footballers or others."
But it's not just their dad's firm views that have influenced the Mayo children. They have become consumer champions in their own right, choosing to boycott Nestle cereals over the company's controversial promotion of baby milk in developing countries. By pure coincidence, the three children all attend Greenwich schools and were participants in Jamie Oliver's experiment to change school dinners. Aged eight, ten and 12, two are at primary school and one is at secondary school. "They loved having Jamie come into to school. For my eldest, it was somebody he could relate to. He said to me: 'Well, it's not Delia Smith. He's not posh' _ and what Jamie did was to talk to the children in a way that they could understand. My son is now absolutely convinced that it shouldn't be chips on the school menu," says Mayo, proudly. "My second son," he continued, "is bit more mechanistic about the whole thing because when Jamie Oliver came into his school, a primary school, he allowed children to have seconds. So in a Dickensian way he liked the food, but he also liked the fact that he could have another helping." One of the most important things that came out of the Jamie Oliver experiment, Mayo explains, is that you have to have children signing up to the ideals of healthy eating as well as the parents.
For Mayo, Oliver is a candidate for early sainthood. "The good news is that he's not going away and he's committed to all these kinds of issues." Mayo admits that some industry groups that he has talked to are very scared about the "Jamie Oliver effect. They are worried that it is going to come their way and look at what they are doing in terms of marketing or how they are not increasing awareness through proper information on nutritional food." But, that, of course, is the point.
However, Mayo's consumer awareness, unlike that of a large proportion of the British poulation, did not begin with Jamie Oliver. He has been involved with a variety of consumer campaigns for a number of years and was one of the co-founders of the Fairtrade Mark which now covers more than 400 products. For Mayo, this was merely continuing a trend that began with consumer protests over bread in 15th-century England and was still going strong when the NCC was founded in 1975. "Food is absolutely at the top of our agenda as a consumer campaign group, and it has been right from the very start. Somehow we've made cars safe, toasters safe, and children's toys safe, but the system we have still doesn't deliver food in the same way."
Mayo insists that the current debate on food and nutrition needs to extend beyond talking about obesity. "There is a peak of concern at the moment around the issue of obesity. In part, that is because the government has been so slow to wake up to the transformation in eating habits that we as a consumer group have seen. But it is worrying that food issues are reduced down to obesity, when there are actually a whole host of other isues going on around food and health."
One of these issues is access to food. "There are food deserts all across the UK. I use a measure which I call 'access to fresh lettuce'. It looks at whether the only way you can get to shops that can offer a balanced diet of food is in an inconvenient way. So perhaps you could hop on a train or get on a bus and travel for a long time to get healthy food, but with busy lives that is unrealistic."
Mayo is also adamant that eating healthily, and sustainably, is not just something middle-class families care about. It is not, contrary to popular belief, a class issue. "The work that we've done with low-income consumers," he explained, "shows that they are very interested in organic and sustainable food. The problem is that they are too expensive." Mayo wants to work towards widening access to organic and locally produced food, rather than make it the middle-class enclave it seems to be.
Indeed, he predicts that issues around food and sustainability are going to be the next big area we concentrate on. "Issues that will become increasingly important," he says, "are going to be things such as the contribution the household food budget makes to climate change, and how much fish we should eat, when we know that in the North Sea we're running out of cod."
For this, and all food-related issues, Mayo believes that the large retailers have to take much of the responsibility. "Four out of five pounds spent on food gets spent in the large retail establishments, so they have to take the lead in addressing these problems. The good news is that retailers are starting to pick up their acts." If they don't, Mayo thinks that consumers will lead the way and hit them where it hurts most_ in the pocket. "This is not to say that children will have less pocket money to spend on food or that adults won't be spending the same amount on food, but rather it will be targeted towards the more healthy rather than the high-fat, low-nutrition lines."
Mayo has given manufacturers plenty of warning. "I have told them not to assume that their competitors are not ahead of them."
Next time they are in his office, perhaps they might like to add their own comment to his whiteboard: "Ed gives the best advice in the world!"
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