Do you check the label?

I was recently interviewed for a BBC Panorama special on food labelling. The more questions I answered, the more I felt that the current regime was over-complicated and probably irrelevant or misunderstood by the great British Public. But it is important that consumers know what's in their food to ensure a balanced diet, avoid certain additives and ingredients, identify health benefits and check where the food was produced.

But how many consumers actually read the label? The most recent Food Standards Agency Consumer Attitudes survey found that nearly half of consumers didn't even look at the label when buying for the first time. And the interested consumers look mainly at nutrition information and ingredients or, as the Food and Drink Federation has found, price and the use by date.

At LFI, we have checked thousands of food labels for compliance with the law and found many grey areas. The law says the label should indicate the name and address of the manufacturer or packer or seller. Consumers generally look at the seller's address and assume that's the country of origin. Not necessarily! Then there are all the questionable marketing terms, such as 'traditional', 'home made', 'country style' and 'natural'.

The clean labelling trend means that firms use full names for additives rather than E numbers, as consumers try to avoid them. 'Soya lecithin' sounds better than 'E322', for example, so is food labelling a big waste of money? Half the population do not read them. The food industry spends a fortune complying with the rules. Enforcement authorities spend a fortune enforcing the rules.

Maybe in the future, when everyone shops online, all foods will be delivered in a white packet bearing a number relating to the website entry giving all the information you could possibly want. But then I guess that would leave the question: which manufacturer would use the most attractive font for the number?