checking if they do so. Health and Safety Officers only visit farms once every 11 years, on average, due to shortage of manpower.

The only checks that take place are routine tests of foods for pesticide residues. Until recently, there was no legal limit on the amount of pesticides in food, although there were guidelines, and food above the recommended levels could be seized and destroyed. In July 1988, maximum residue limits (MRLs) came into force for cereals, and in January 1989 MRLs for fruit and vegetables were introduced. These limits have only been introduced by the British government because EEC legislation required them, and they do not cover post-harvest fungicides such as those sprayed on to stored potatoes.

The main burden of testing foods falls on local authority Environmental Health Officers, who are able to test for about 20 pesticides – only 5 per cent of those in use. Although the 20 they test for are those most widely used, this is still rather \ worrying, since there are about 400 pesticides whose misuse would go unnoticed. When foods are found with excess pesticide levels, they are simply destroyed – no effort is made to trace the source of the food or prevent further misuse of pesticides.

Pesticides are also monitored annually by the Total Diet Study, which considers a larger number of pesticides – over a hundred in recent years. Samples are taken that correspond to the national average diet, all the foods are combined and the mixture is tested for pesticide residues. Unfortunately, only about 25 samples are taken, representing a minute fraction of the total food eaten annually in Britain – the chances of missing high residues on certain crops is enormous. And the Total Diet Study is still only looking at a quarter of all the pesticides available for use.

When pesticides are banned in the West, the companies producing them often try to increase their sales to Third World countries, where safety regulations are less stringent – or non-existent. So imported foods may contain residues of pesticides that are banned in Britain. Despite this, there are no special provisions for testing imported foods -these are subjected to the same tests as home-grown produce. Paradoxically, pesticides that are banned in Britain are not tested for at all In America, where testing is rather more thorough, high pesticide residues have been found on imported food, including dangerous pesticides that have been banned in the USA. In many Third World countries, there are regular reports of pesticides being used very carelessly, or safety measures being ignored entirely. Deaths among farmworkers in Third World countries, due to pesticide misuse, are believed to be very high.

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Citrus fruits should be tested with orange first, then lemon. If you can eat both of these safely then you need not test the others.

Test yeast before mushrooms. You can either use yeast extract (eg Mar-mite) or yeast vitamin tablets. Or mix half a teaspoon of baker’s yeast with water, boil for ten minutes, and drink when cool.

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When they are introduced, new foods should be given gradually, one at a time, so that any adverse reactions can be related to particular foods. Infections and bouts of diarrhoea make the child more easily sensitized, so new foods should not be introduced if the child is ill.

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In order to break down lactose, we have an enzyme (see pl8) known as lactase (the -ase ending denotes an enzyme) in our intestines. Almost all babies have this enzyme, although there are rare cases in which the enzyme is entirely lacking – these babies are likely to be detected soon after birth because they are made seriously ill by any sort of milk, cow’s or human. Adults tend to lose this enzyme unless they continue taking cow’s milk and milk products from the time they are weaned onwards. In China and Southeast Asia, where milk and cheese are not part of the diet, most adults are lactase-deficient, but they can regain the ability to produce lactase if they persist in drinking milk.

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The seed itself is highly nutritious – it contains all the food the young seedling will need to become established – so the plant must guard its seeds well.

Animals who might be tempted to break the apricot stone open and eat the seed as well are deterred by toxins, principally cyanides (the chemicals that give almonds and apricot kernels their characteristic smell and flavour). As a final safeguard, die parent plant adds a chemical to the outer skin of the fruit that affects the animal’s gut. It speeds up the movements of the gut, making it void the stone more rapidly, so that the damage done by the digestive juices is minimised. This is why so many fruits have a laxative effect.

Nuts are rather more generous to their animal partners. They rely on animals such as squirrels that hoard food for the winter months, and they operate a ‘planned loss’ strategy, whereby a great many of the seeds are actually eaten. The pay-off is that the squirrels not only disperse the seed, but also plant them in a suitable spot when creating their winter stores. Since they inevitably forget where some are planted, a proportion of the nuts survive and grow into trees.

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