Nutrition and flavour-legislation.

Our food laws have to provide for safety of food and to ensure that the consumer is not misled. We are no longer in a position to manufacture food without additives and especially without flavours. For physiological reasons, our food should be offered in a wide variety; an increasing number of food preparations has no natural flavour at all and needs to be flavoured and the industrial manufacture of food requires the flavours to be properly developed in order to withstand the sometimes rather drastic conditions of manufacture. The safety of flavours and flavouring substances is discussed. It is shown that the class of nature-identical flavouring substances has to be treated separately for practical purposes of food control and because the substances of this group offer more certainty with regard to their safety. Some suggestions are made regarding the proper labelling of food which contains flavours. The IOFI (International Organization of the Flavour Industry) model law is discussed which should serve as a basic proposal for the international harmonisation of national food laws.