Food Scare.

Europe, September, 1999 by Barber, Lionel

Consumers' food safety concerns threaten to snarl transatlantic relations

Europe is in a funk about food safety. Beef hormones, Coca-Cola, eggs, genetically modified foods, or mad cow disease - in each of these cases public confidence plummeted this summer.

The immediate cause is a succession of food safety scares that have wrong-footed governments and forced traditionally powerful food producers in Europe and the US onto the defensive.

In Belgium, worries about cancer-causing dioxin obliged the government to recall millions of eggs and hundreds of thousands of pounds of meat products. The shelves in supermarkets were so bare that many believe the embarrassment deprived Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene of re-election in the June poll. ...