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Most of the books which I would select have already been chosen, but if I were cast upon a desert island, I would find myself at something of a loss without Lawrie's Meat Science, Pergamon Press, 2nd Edition, 1974 and Kent's Technology of Cereals. I would also like to have a copy of a very old‐fashioned book, The Nation's Food by Bacharach and Rendle, S.C.I., 1946 with me. What a pity this book can't be updated! It contains such a valuable collection of data which are nowhere else so conveniently displayed and arranged. Of course, I would have to have a biochemistry text and for this I would take the 4th Edition of White, Handlers and Smith's Principles of Biochemistry published by McGraw Hill.

Under this melodramatic title the B.B.C. devoted forty minutes of their programme time during the evening of December 28 to the subject of food additives. It was described as an enquiry, asking the questions “Are the chemicals we put in food dangerous to human beings?” Are the sytems of testing and control good enough? Should more money be spent on research now? There was a panel of experts—Professor E. Boyland (Chester Beatty Research Institute), Professor A. C. Fraser (University of Birmingham), Dr. L. Golberg (British Industrial Biological Research Association), Dr. H. G. Saunders (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries & Food), Dr. Magnus Pyke (a food expert) and Lord Shackleton, who frequently speaks on the subject in the House of Lords.

There seem to be four main influences which may bring about major changes in our food and the way it is prepared during the next 50 years.

It is not possible to foresee the future. Yet there is evidence accruing to show that at the present time we are at what could be called ‘a hinge of history’, by which it can be argued that we are now passing through a period when the future is coming at us with a rush. It is therefore worthwhile to re‐examine some of the current assumptions about food and nutrition which we accept, perhaps unthinkingly, today.

The taboos which constrain our diet and prevent the European — but not the Chinese — from enjoying a meal of roast puppy and the Hindu from eating beef are an indication of the special beliefs we still hold about eating, as indeed do the initial prejudices which are so commonly expressed at the first mention of synthetic or artificial food.

One of the most remarkable discoveries of modern food science has been that for the majority of the adult human beings on earth and for a significant minority of children, milk may be actively harmful. By milk, I mean cows' milk, the beverage which has been esteemed and praised, claimed from its analysis to be the “perfect” food, shown by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins in 1912 by its dramatic effect on the growth of young white rats to be the vehicle of undiscovered vitamins, and demonstrated by Corry Mann in 1926 to improve the health of orphan boys given a diet otherwise calculated to be adequate. Yet during the last few years a number of cases have come to light of a condition in infants of severe diarrhoea and malnutrition which is found to improve when milk is withdrawn from the babies' diet. This has since been shown to be due to the presence in milk of an ingredient toxic to these infants. Nor was the toxic ingredient which produced these effects an adventitious poisonous contaminant, the result of bacterial infection or, indeed, a trace component present in low concentration or measured in parts per million at the lower limits of analytical detection. The toxic agent was lactose, the naturally‐occurring sugar of milk constituting 5 per cent of its total weight and making up 39·7 per cent of the total milk solids.

Literature, in the ordinary sense of the word, is the written record of something worth saying, well said. In the special sense in which it is now used, ‘the literature’ is everything that is published by scientists and about science. It includes weighty and scholarly monographs and textbooks, long and detailed reports of researches occupying half the lifetime of a man, substantial contributions by teams of workers announcing discoveries of first‐rate importance—and short notes of detailed observations, descriptions of new apparatus, fresh techniques, the use of a new reagent, sometimes merely the use of an old reagent but differently applied. The literature includes as well secondary literature, reviews of papers already published, lists of titles, abstracts, translations, patents. There is even a tertiary literature comprising reviews of topics already covered by other reviews and collections of abstracts. And as the backbone of the tertiary literature we always have the steady output of textbooks and handbooks, of published symposia and colloquia containing articles which are themselves reviews of abstracts of the primary literature in which the actual scientific facts are reported.

How happy we are to be able to live a comfortable, warm, wealthy life in the modern age of today. Grateful to science we may not be but just the same we know, if we ever stop to think—which we seldom do—that we ought to be. Spinsters no longer have to spend hour after hour spinning to make the thread to weave the sheets we sleep between. As a matter of fact, no one has to labour in the boggy fields to grow flax any more to produce the linen which, once upon a time, had to be grown before even those few rich people who could afford linen sheets could have them. As it happens, making linen is a disagreeable smelly business. The flax has to be cut down and left to rot in the fields so that the fibres can be beaten out of it. This rotting process—so called, wretting—is probably the second most disgusting process of the pre‐scientific age, exceeded in disagreeability only by the tanning of leather in which the hides have to be soaked for weeks in a slush of dog manure which, strangely, is the richest source of the particular enzyme which most effectively softens the skins. Those whose fortune it once was to live down‐wind of a tannery can confirm the primacy of its potent effect on what once was called the atmosphere, now known as environment.

In volume 17 of the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics published in 1973 there is a paper by S.C. Hsu which gives details of the changes that took place in the diet and the nutritional status of the population of Taiwan between 1960 and 1970. During the course of this decade enormous improvements were achieved in agricultural productivity leading to a major increase in the amount of food available to the population. Detailed studies of the diet which the people ate and of their nutritional status enabled an assessment of changes on the public health to be made. At the beginning, the weight and stature of the children were less than at the end and, whereas in 1960 riboflavin deficiency in the adult population, indicated by the presence of angular stomatitis, was observed in 78 per cent of the men and women examined, by 1970 the figure had fallen to 17 per cent. A number of other signs were observed showing that as the food supply of the island gradually improved, undernutrition, anaemia and vitamin deficiency became less common in parallel. On the other hand, by 1970, heart disease ranked first among the causes of mortality whereas it had been fourth in the 1950's and the incidence of gout showed a marked increase.

The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Minister of Food and the Secretary of State for Scotland, appointed a Working Party in May, 1951, “to examine the present structure of producers' prices for milk and to advise whether it is desirable and practicable to make revisions which would promote an improvement in the composition and quality of milk sold off farms in the United Kingdom”. The Working Party has now issued a Report (H.M.S.O.).