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When Sir David Attenborough used this term, it conveyed a dramatic impression of animal life and its vitality in the desert which, to the uninitiated, could be considered as a wasteland. Equally dramatic is the variety and richness of plant life, evident occasionally and appearing as if by magic in response to a few drops of rain; but now in the days of intensive agriculture, the desert is producing richly, and to order, an abundance of crops. Has the technology bringing abundant water to areas which were arid for most of the year changed the eating habits of the Saudi? What are his traditional patterns of eating and would they be considered satisfactory both to prevent deficiency and to maintain harmony within a ‘NACNE’ style guideline? Have the traditional patterns of eating changed after the opening up of the country and, more recently, the development of intensive agriculture within the country? Derek H Shrimpton PhD provides some answers to these questions.

Mr Pickwick's fat boy not only showed the pleasure to be gained from food but encapsulates, in his action, the theory and practice of ‘this slimming business’ and identifies, in his comment, a major stimulus to weight control.

At the passing of the Fair Trading Act, 1973, and the setting up of a Consumer Protection Service with an Office of Fair Trading under a Director‐General, few could have visualized this comprehensive machinery devised to protect the mainly economic interests of consumers could be used to further the efforts of local enforcement officers and authorities in the field of purity and quality control of food and of food hygiene in particular. This, however, is precisely the effect of a recent initiative under Sect. 34 of the Act, reported elsewhere in the BFJ, taken by the Director‐General in securing from a company operating a large group of restaurants a written undertaking, as prescribed by the Section, that it would improve its standards of hygiene; the company had ten convictions for hygiene contraventions over a period of six years.

New field for Infomart. Infomart, SDC's agent in Canada, recently announced that it had entered the field of electronic publishing with an influx of $6 million from two of Canada's largest communication companies, Southam Inc. and Torstar Corporation. Infomart recently hosted an international forum on the future of videotex in Canada.