The other morning my small child surprised me by pointing to the now-familiar traffic light system on a cereal box. Red! What does that mean, Mummy? Er, it means it’s high in sugar, I said, inspecting the box more closely. Now, I am going to do the sort of waffling that gets me into trouble with certain members of the dairy community, but while I can see their point about the traffic light labelling – it’s too simplistic, particularly for cheese – you’ve got to admit that it’s effective, if a four-year old can figure out that red means high in sugar. But it’s not a perfect system by any means.

The problem with labels is that everyone wants something different on them. The cheese people would like the good aspects of the product highlighted – loads of calcium, nutrition packed into a small portion – while skipping over the issues of salt and calories per 100 grams. The anti-dairy people would probably like to highlight the latter, while ignoring the former. Cheese, as we all agree, has very many good points. Its drawbacks are very much less than that of other foodstuffs. As one King’s College lecturer pointed out in one session, “Fat children do not tend to eat dairy. They eat crisps and drink fizzy drinks.”

I think Jim Begg has a good point when he asked at a recent APPC reception for “a benign legal environment”, but I am not sure who gets to decide that about labelling, either in the UK and the European Union. In the meantime, we all look at labels and try to decode them, both as consumers and as industry members.