Interview: Peter Barron, Newsnight editor (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

WATCH out, Michael Howard: Newsnight is about to become "dangerous" again. Howard, you may recall, was famously skewered on the programme by Jeremy Paxman, who asked 14 times if he had threatened to overrule the prisons boss. But that was back in 1997 - since when, in some critics' eyes, Newsnight has ceded television's analytical crown to a sparkier Channel 4 News.

In the past year, BBC2's flagship current-affairs show has made headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Hutton Inquiry revealed that its science editor, Susan Watts, had dismissed as "glib" David Kelly's concerns about Downing Street's role in the Iraq weapons dossier, and failed to follow up the story - only later to attack her bosses' "misguided and false" attempts to make her back Andrew Gilligan's account.

Then there was its refusal to air Michael Crick's "Betsygate" investigation, its apology to Humbers ide's pol ice chief for a "misleadingly" edited interview, and continuing questions over Kirsty Wark's refusal to cooperate with Lord Fraser's inquiry into the Holyrood Parliament building. No wonder Paxman has lately seemed even tetchier than usual.

But with a new director-general, and a new programme editor, we are promised a shake-up. Peter Barron, former deputy editor on Channel 4 News and ITV's Tonight with Trevor McDonald, wants Newsnight to become unpredictable again. "If it isn't a risk-taking, troublemaking, awkward programme," he says, "then you might as well pack up and go home."

Barron, 41, avoids criticising the previous regime: a question about whether departing editor George Entwistle has bequeathed a "tired" programme elicits a 15-second pause, an anxious glance at the press officer, and an anodyne response about it being "in very robust form". He then adds delicately: "My role would be to build on that and try to inject more creativity and sense of surprise. I want to capture the exciting and dangerous things happening in the programme's window." We can expect a "broadening of the agenda", for a start. "I think that journalism generally, and Newsnight, has concentrated too much on Westminster politics when there are vast forces that are much more powerful," Barron says - issues such as those he explored in If ... , the BBC2 drama-documentary series he edited.

"If Newsnight's role is to probe and make accountable politicians, then it should also hold to account the other big forces that affect our lives - business, the huge shifts in science and technology, the people who run huge organisations who get away with being very lightly scrutinised." Former colleagues say he cares little for party politics - "if anything he's a little bit Conservative, but you wouldn't know", says one.

His aversion is not to Westminster's "men in suits", he stresses, but "to programmes which go through the motions and do things lazily. To my mind, Newsnight is at its worst if it's just a longer version of the 10 O'Clock News." Barron faces a more pressing reason to rethink the show. "It has to be more surprising because of ITV rescheduling its news to 10.30pm," suggests Jeremy Vine, a former presenter. "If it's just the top stories you want, you'll go to ITV. The big question for Peter is does Newsnight have to change in response."

JIM Gray, editor of Channel 4 News, insists that it does need to change - partly by being "less predictable", but also by confronting more directly the big breaking stories. "Newsnight is more reflective than Channel 4 News, and they should address that," Gray advises.

Barron accepts that the programme needs to be more distinctive, avoiding crossover with other BBC news programmes. Last week, for instance, Newsnight carried an East Timor package barely different from one broadcast 30 minutes earlier on The World Tonight. His answer is that Newsnight should "step back" and provoke the viewer into thinking about bigger issues.

Yet after Hutton, questions remain over how provocative the BBC can be. Hadn't Michael Crick recently identified "almost a paralysis" in editorial decision-making, with endless calls for "an extra opinion, an outside lawyer, an extra source"? "Michael is one of the best people in TV journalism, and he will continue to be on Newsnight," Barron replies. "But I don't agree.

Newsnight's role is to be challenging and to take risks. And that's going to continue." Mark Thompson's appointment, he adds, "augurs well" for this approach.

He will not say if he would have broadcast Crick's "Betsygate" film, nor if Susan Watts will return after maternity leave. He also professes to knowing "nothing about" allegations that Kirsty Wark's authority may have been compromised over the Fraser Inquiry. But he does believe that the BBC's new complaints procedure will give Newsnight the confidence to pursue "challenging" journalism.

"I'm sure we will occasionally make a mistake," he says, "but if you've got a good safety net, you can do somersaults on the high wire." The new boss certainly has Newsnight in his blood. The son of a Belfast electricity worker (his mother died when he was young), he joined the programme as a BBC trainee 15 years ago, having "wanted to edit it ever since I first saw it". Barron worked his way up to assistant editor, "playing in every position, like Terry Venables", and even married a production colleague, Julia Stroud.

HE EARNED a reputation for sharp, lateral news judgments: a former staffer recalls how he interrupted a high-minded morning meeting in February 1993 to berate colleagues for missing the day's "real" story, about a boy who had gone missing in a shopping centre.

The boy's name was James Bulger.

When Jim Gray left Newsnight to edit Channel 4 News in 1998, he took Barron along to help reinvent the programme. "What he'll bring is inventiveness, originality, good sparky ideas, and a truer sense of original journalism," Gray says. "If he's up to causing sensation and shock, then good on him. He knows what works." But Barron, a BBC loyalist once more, refuses to cede any ground to Channel 4. "Newsnight is the best programme for serious analysis," he insists. It also offers "the only real commitment in daily news and current affairs to serious filmmaking" - although he admits to wanting more of the independent films that have made Channel 4 News distinctive. But if people insist on seeing the programmes as competitors, "then quite simply I'm looking forward to the fight".

He becomes most animated when defending the populist appeal of Tonight, which he joined in 2002.

"There is a huge amount of complacency, at the BBC and in the industry, about what Tonight does," he says. "It's easy for people to say it uses chequebook journalism and is obsessed by obesity.

But it breaks a huge number of controversial stories. I'm proud of Tonight and will bring to Newsnight a lot of that determination to win." He then cites a string of Tonight exclusives during his 10-month tenure, from Living with Michael Jackson ("which sold to 120 countries") to "a fantastically controversial" discussion between Tony Blair and antiwar women. "I produced that myself," Barron says.

"The Prime Minister said afterwards, 'Who the f*** set that up?' That was something Newsnight should have done." Can he list Newsnight's scoops over the same period? "I've been busy doing my own programmes," he says, a little uncomfortably.

Let's see if there is more to remember this time next year.

(Evening Standard, May 26 2004)

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Interview: Roger Alton, editor, The Observer (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

ROGER Alton is adamant that he is boring. "I've got absolutely nothing to say of any interest," he insists as he bounds, 20 minutes late, into his office. "I really think you should go back now and say, actually, f***, there's nothing there." Alton, who has reversed The Observer's decline over the past six years, must be the most self-deprecating executive in Fleet Street.

"Where anyone else would try to sound cleverer than they are, Roger's constantly declaring how useless he is," grins a senior colleague. It may be an affectation, designed to disarm potential critics, but, along with the relentless expletives and his sometimes dishevelled personal organisation, it has endeared him to the staff like none of his short-lived predecessors.

"He's a great bloke who just manages to motivate you," is a typical refrain. He might lack The Sunday Times's budgets, but, backed by The Guardian's financial weight, he has restored both internal morale and a stable if slowly rising readership.

Today his enthusiasm focuses on that unfashionable cause, Tony Blair. While Alan Rusbridger, four floors below, discusses turning The Guardian firmly against the warravaged premier, Alton, 56, remains a rare voice of barely qualified support. "I think Blair has done a fantastic job," he says, dismissing the growing clamour for an early succession. "This idea from the Labour Left, the romantic antiwar platoon, that Gordon would chug off into a socialist nirvana is absolute cack." It was, Alton acknowledges, "a significant event" when, two weeks ago, Blair invited key Guardian supporters to Chequers to affirm their loyalty (although, asked if he ever visits Chequers, Alton uncomfortably deflects the question).

For his own part, not even failures in Iraq - after a war that The Observer controversially backed - have dented his faith in No 10. "The overall aims were moral and good, and will turn out to be moral and good," he says. Not even reports of prisoner abuse have changed his mind. "I mean, Fallujah might not yet be Maidstone, but from what I hear of Iraq, it is infinitely better than it was - there's a plethora of newspapers, very free markets, a lot of education ... The post-war planning clearly hasn't been good, but don't forget, there are only a small number of British troops there. Yet Blair is regarded in large parts of the media, among the chatterati, as if he's the prime mover."

NOT, Alton adds, that his staff agree with him. "You feel you're the last living Englishman," he shrugs. Most readers, too, have opposed his support for the war - which led The Independent on Sunday to target them mischievously with posters stating: "Observer readers - if you're antiwar, you're reading the wrong newspaper." But did he miss a circulation trick by not taking the more popular antiwar line? "On major issues like that, it would be inconceivable to say one thing because you'd make more money. You decide a leader line according to what you think is right, not on commercial considerations. Besides, there is no real indication that being pro or anti- would have made any difference. It is often claimed that The Observer suffered for its line [attacking the Government] over Suez. But within a year circulation was higher than before."

Bellicosity has its place in Alton's broad interpretation of a "liberal" newspaper's remit. "Don't forget, the editorial line is one small part of package which includes a whole range of voices, from Mary Riddell, who is very opposed, to David Aaronovitch, who was pro and is now more agonised, to expert reporters who will tell you what it's actually like on the ground, however damaging that is to the MoD.

You take issues as they come." Does "liberal" still mean anything? "Absolutely," he replies. "It's being open to things, not having a knee-jerk response to anything. Look, David Beckham is in the National Portrait Gallery, but he's also on the front page of the People. Does that make him upmarket posh or not posh? Things are complex."

But isn't this a notably apolitical view of liberalism? "Well, not ideological," he says. "Though I am very inclined to get behind [Liberal Democrat candidate] Simon Hughes for London mayor. I think Ken is fantastically self-serving. But it would be good if Simon was slightly more charismatic ... "

Alton was at the Liverpool Post until he joined The Guardian in 1974 as a sub-editor. After The Guardian bought The Observer in 1993, circulation plunged towards 400,000 as a series of editors struggled against better resourced rivals and what one editor, Andrew Jaspan, condemned as infighting "brought on by The Guardian's own plotting and destabilisation".

ALTON was brought in to restore stability in 1998. By last month, circulation was 450,119 (422,361 excluding giveaways) - nowhere near The Sunday Times's 1.4 million, but more than double that of The Independent on Sunday.

The rise will continue, Alton asserts: "The initial target is a steady 475,000, then 500,000 to hold. I think we can." He also plays down reports that the paper loses up to £10 million a year, claiming that "internal breakeven", through which overheads are shared with The Guardian, is "not far away".

His strategy, he says, is down to "a very high standard of journalism - from Tim Adams, one of the best writers I've ever read, to Andrew Rawnsley on politics, they alone make the paper worth £1.40." But surely it is the expensive monthly food, sport and music colour magazines that have been the real circulation boosters? "They've taken the spikes out of our sales, driving circulation and advertising," he responds. "But they're all washing their faces.

We're very pleased with them." It remains "a struggle", he admits, competing in a weekend market where free CDs and a multitude of sections enable some papers to offer "£15 worth of stuff for a quid". There will, he says, inevitably be casualties.

"Common sense says that something will have to give. People only have a finite amount of time." One option, he suggests, is for papers to slim down again. "Maybe it's time to move away from the great Andrew Neil 'supermarket' [Neil's strategy when editing the multisection Sunday Times]. But you try to take a couple of sections away - it's commercial folly." Reformatting The Observer is a more likely option. Although Alton says that "officially" he is not tied to The Guardian's preferred format of an elongated continental-style tabloid, he does favour this " European" format. But nothing, he says, will happen in the next year. "You just can't do it in that time."

There are internal discussions about a fourth monthly magazine, but Alton is still searching for the right idea. Meanwhile, he is hoping soon to add a new sports columnist to his roster: "I texted Piers [ Morgan] on Saturday and asked if he'd like to interview Arsene Wenger for our sports mag. Wouldn't it be great to have two of the most famous people in the world chatting together?"

(Evening Standard, May 19 2004)

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The Observer: How technology is changing our food

Still worried about 'E' numbers? Do try to keep up. How about sliced bread that lasts for months? Or steak and chips rustled up from the submolecular constituents of nothing more than fresh air? As David Rowan reports, food technologists are dreaming up ever new ways of feeding us - and the future is any colour you want

Think of Thomas Hefti the next time you sip a soft drink. As a senior scientist with the world's biggest flavourings manufacturer, there is a very good chance that Hefti will have designed the precise taste sensation that follows. With a repertoire approaching 20,000 synthetic varieties - 300 for strawberry alone - the quietly spoken flavourist has simply to flare his wide moustache-brushed nostrils to know whether his latest concoction needs a tad more methyl benzoate, a drop less butyl isobutyrate. Surrounded by hundreds of vials in his laboratory outside Zurich, his nose at the service of his scientific knowledge, Hefti's chemical wizardry is helping define the modern food industry.

You may not have heard of his Swiss company, Givaudan, but you will certainly have sampled its range in your breakfast cereals, ice creams, herbal teas, biscuits, cake-mixes, soups and chewing-gums - indeed, anywhere a manufacturer might add flavourings to enhance a foodstuff's taste. Today Givaudan's formulations go into one in every five of the world's artificially flavoured foods; and although the company will not name its customers, you can safely assume that it supplies most of the big names.

This morning's challenge for Hefti is to develop an innovative grapefruit flavour, followed by a new synthesis of lime and, if he has time, a modern variety of mandarin. He knows the optimal amount of trans-2-hexenal that will enhance a sweet's apple flavouring - and that, by reformulating the recipe with added heptyl acetate, he can turn apple into pear. The secret is what he calls 'creative appraisal' of the flavours provided by nature: although a real banana comprises around 225 volatile flavour components, Hefti can engineer an artificial alternative using just nine ingredients, although some formulations will need up to 70. A kilogram of the recipe - vanillin, ethyl butyrate, isoamyl acetate, benzyl acetate, eugenol, phenethyl alcohol, isoamyl isovalerate, cis-3-hexenol, all mixed into a solvent - will flavour 5,000 litres of drinks. Even if it lacks the fresh fruit's nuances, the result is impressively familiar to anyone who has ever tasted a banana fast-food milkshake.

Some tastes are harder to synthesise - 'a good coffee flavour is tough,' Hefti admits - but he relishes the challenge. In the meantime, there are always newly discovered natural tastes and smells to reproduce, thanks to Givaudan's international expedition programme. In hot-air-balloon missions over Madagascan rainforest, botanists seek out highly flavoured 'new' molecules from plants and tree bark. Its laboratories have already copied some examples for use in children's lollipops.

But do we really need 300 varieties of factory-manufactured strawberry flavouring? You might expect your strawberry yoghurt or premium ice cream to contain at least a smidgen of fruit derivatives, but that would be to underestimate the skills of the professional flavourist (not forgetting his peers specialising in colourings and preservation). Not that the catch-all term 'flavouring' on the label is designed to arouse any suspicions about the synthetic formulations within.

Thomas Hefti's patient smile suggests that he has been put on the defensive before. It would, he explains calmly, be uneconomic for the food industry to rely solely on real strawberries; there would not be enough fresh fruit to go round, and besides, the individual berries contain far too little natural flavour to make large-scale extraction viable. What works for a cake mix might taste wrong in a child's medicine. 'And not everyone wants the same flavour,' he adds. 'Even in nature you have strawberries that are riper or greener. The foodstuff producer might want their product recognised as distinct.'

Besides, we consumers apparently want those heavily processed tastes that have become familiar. 'If a German consumer is used to eating tinned pineapple, he will expect a tinned pineapple flavour,' Hefti claims. 'But in the Philippines, they will expect pineapple flavourings to taste like fresh pineapples.' In other words, having weaned us off fresh fruit, the food industry now finds us rejecting the taste of the real thing.

Givaudan's scientists do not like the word 'artificial'. Heini Menzi, vice president for European R&D, explains that it would be helpful if this article instead used the term 'nature identical' to refer to non-natural flavourings. 'NI' chemicals, Dr Menzi explains, are identical in their molecular composition to ingredients found in nature. The difference is that they have been synthesised in the lab by a chemical process - allowing a flavour originating in a plant to be manufactured cost-effectively in vast quantities.

There can be big savings: it will cost around £4,500 to isolate a kilogram of vanillin, which flavours everything from ice cream to cola drinks, directly from vanilla beans. But in the lab it can be synthesised for less than £6 per kilogram, typically using by-products from the paper or petrochemical industries. Either way, you end up with 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde, and if the marketing people insist that consumers want vitamin C in their non-natural orange-flavoured drink, it can always be added later.

What really frustrates Menzi is the perception that NI flavourings are any less wholesome. 'The public assumes that natural means healthy, that NI means dubious - and that's not true,' he says. 'All food is only chemistry, after all - but that sort of language is scary to the general public. So people become concerned, "Oh, this is artificial..." And to some extent, yes it is. But the chemist can get to the same molecule, whether he takes it physically out of the raw plant, or via synthesis. From a taste point of view, you could use either.'

Besides, he adds, naturally sourced flavours may include all sorts of undesirable residues left over from the farm: herbicides, pesticides, microorganisms, even levels of plant toxins that, he suggests, could be harmful. In a state-of-the-art plant like Givaudan's, the consumer is guaranteed a healthier end product, he suggests and if he is aware of any irony in his explanation, he does not show it.

In the vast factory where the chemistry takes shape, a short stroll from the development labs, each formulation is defined by its own intense pungent or treacle-sweet odour: burnt roast beef one moment, caramel and peardrops the next, barley soup and horseradish to follow. Two industrial robots create the more common flavours from 400 chemical compounds; around them, white-coated men mix the smaller batches by hand from among 2,500 ingredients piped down from the storage vaults. These ingredients are stored in large tubs labelled with words you rarely see on food-ingredients lists: 'Ethyl octanoate-2', 'Hexenal-2-trans', 'Pentyl-iso valerate', 'Butanol', 'Neryl acetate', 'Ethyl decanoate', 'Benzaldehyde', 'Valerolactone gamma', and occasionally a gentler, more familiar term such as orange oil or eucalyptol. The resulting formulations, stacked up in sealed plastic tubs at the loading yard, show how global this industry has become: Worcester sauce flavouring going to South Africa, tomato flavouring heading to Japan. An orange-juice flavouring, to 'improve' Slovenian OJ, is labelled 'Highly flammable, Harmful'. There is even 'black tea' flavouring destined for China.

'Humanity doesn't need a single extra flavour,' Menzi admits, 'but the market will absorb more. Each year there are one or two new chemicals that have an impact.' Advances in neuroscience, he says, will produce further innovations: 'Once we understand how we perceive sweetness, we could think of molecules with no calorific value that trigger the right neurons,' he explains.

Still, as science brings them ever-greater opportunities, Givaudan's visionaries accept that they cannot ignore the public's prejudices. 'Today you have a lot of consumers in Europe concerned about the authenticity of food,' Menzi says. 'They want authentic strawberry flavours, authentic chicken - and that puts a lot of weight on natural raw materials.' If the market demands more natural raw materials, then Menzi will supply them. But, he is at pains to point out, 'that doesn't mean that natural is any better than NI'.

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Sue Dengate first knew there was something wrong with her daughter Rebecca when, as a baby, she simply refused to sleep. 'It was terrible,' Dengate says from her home in New South Wales. 'There's nothing more tiring with a baby who needs round-the-clock attention. Then, as Rebecca grew older, she was constantly restless and irritable, very difficult to discipline, and quite defiant. It was as if she entered the terrible twos and never came out.'

Only when Rebecca was 11 was she diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). By systematically excluding food ingredients using the elimination diet, Sue discovered the cause of her daughter's problems. 'That diet was our magic solution,' she says. 'Within days, avoiding the foods that caused all the trouble, she was a completely different person. There are 50 additives which have been found to disrupt children's behaviour, and Rebecca had been affected by all of them. The trouble is, there are more of them being added all the time - and they're released on to the market before their effects have been properly tested.'

The experience set Dengate on a long campaign to help other families whose health had suffered because of food additives. She has written books including Fed Up and The Failsafe Cookbook , and now runs a a support group called the Food Intolerance Network. Its heart-wrenching members' newsletter, combining personal tales of despair with amateur investigative science, lists problems such as children's asthma, migraines, skin rashes and irritable bowel syndrome that are firmly blamed on an ever-growing range of commonly used additives. 'What I thought was fresh meat from my local supermarket hasn't been fresh at all,' contributes one mother in the most recent edition, after discovering that her daughter's severe asthma improved when she switched to a local butcher's steaks. 'Meat is sent to the supermarket in vacuum packs, then repacked in trays and sold as fresh. But the pack lasts the supermarket up to eight weeks, so the meat can be up to 60 days old in the vacuum pack before sold as fresh.' Another writes: 'My three-year-old daughter developed eczema at six months when I introduced solids, and by eight months she needed frequent cortisone cream.' After isolating food additives that were the cause, the eczema is almost gone.

Some of the complaints concern synthetic bread preservatives and antioxidants used to prevent rancidity in oils (reactions include asthma, depression, fatigue and learning difficulties). Others relate to 'natural' additives such as the colouring annatto yellow and flavour enhancers called ribonucleotides, that, in the concentrations used in foods, have been linked to itchy skin rashes and swollen mouths and throats in some individuals.

If any of the technologists' other planned innovations do produce unfore seen harmful effects, Sue Dengate warns, it could be decades before we isolate the cause.

Still, at least her own story has a happy ending: Rebecca, now 21, manages to control her diet rigorously, and as a result is healthy. 'And lovely,' her mother adds. 'But you know, even when we discovered what was the cause of her problems, I was left grieving for 11 years of my daughter's life that had been stolen from me. That,' she says a little sadly, 'is the major regret of my life.'

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Readers of Observer Food Monthly might naively imagine that society had finally woken up to the dangers of cheap, over-processed foods, and come to place a value in knowing the provenance of what we eat; that informed opinion now considers natural, if not organic, foods to be worth paying a premium for; and that today's nutrition-led problems, from obesity to children's hyperactivity, ought to be addressed before we commit to tomorrow's genetically modified uncertainties.

But turn instead to publications with names such as Food Chemical News, Food Engineering, Food Product Design and Food Technology , and you quickly realise that the multi-billion-pound food industry has some very different priorities. In the stainless-steel world of perpetual innovation described in their pages, you can watch the vast body of food scientists striving to find ever newer ways to synthesise products to sell to us. This scientific revolution is about anything but returning to nature: today's buzzwords are superingredients and shelf-life extension, nutrigenomics and nutraceuticals, biosensors and biotechnology enhancements. It is not food we are dealing with, you quickly learn, but 'food systems' - industrialised 'solutions' designed to maximise manufacturers' investment returns while promising untold new consumer benefits. Untold benefits, that is, that the last few hundred generations have somehow done without.

The industry's annual pilgrimage this year will be to Las Vegas, where for a week in July the Institute of Food Technologists will bring together 20,000 specialists for its agenda-setting Food Expo. The five-day technical programme suggests just where the industry is heading: with keynote presentations on 'Second generation genetically modified foods', 'Advances in food irradiation research', and 'The role of edible coatings and biopolymers in food packaging', it becomes clear how far the science lab is writing tomorrow's menus.

The schedule also addresses those inconvenient little hurdles that jump up in the way of progress, with workshop topics including cost-effective responses to the obesity crisis ('Expanding Margins, Not Waistlines!'), and, with food regulation a growing menace, a symposium entitled 'The Fallacy of the Consumer's Right to Know'. As one of the speakers promises, it will help manufacturers fight all those 'nonessential' demands from consumers to know what exactly they are eating - demands stemming simply from 'curiosity, faddism and activists'.

Many of those 'faddists' who shun the technologists' advances in favour of organic produce or natural ingredients may despair at the human diet's relentless industrialisation. Yet talking to some of the delegates planning to attend the IFT expo, it becomes clear just how far today's emerging technologies are going to be sold to us on their potential health benefits. 'Nutraceutical' supplements with claimed medicinal benefits are increasingly being designed into mainstream food recipes; in the future, they may be accompanied by 'nutrigenomic' diets, custom-prescribed by doctors to minimise health risks that are highlighted by your personal DNA. Think of nutritionally enhanced eggs or chocolate, designed specifically to lower your chances of developing Alzheimer's or bone cancer. The scenario is not that far removed, considering that chemical additives such as beta apo 8'carotenal, canthaxanthin and citranaxanthin are already widely used in poultry feed to 'enhance' the colour of egg yolks.

It is no surprise that much of today's research money is spent on technologies designed to keep food 'fresher' for longer. Why bin a sliced loaf after a few days if techniques developed for Nasa can preserve it for months if not years? Why rely on pasteurisation if pathogens can be killed using gamma rays?

Since Nasa first irradiated meat 32 years ago to feed the Apollo 17 crew, the technology has persisted as one of the industry's favourite means of prolonging shelf life. Irradiation kills bacteria such as salmonella and E.coli O157, and stops vegetables from sprouting. But its opponents have used concern about chemical byproducts, and damage to vitamins and enzymes, to limit its use. So the public, warned by campaigners that the process can add potential toxins such as formaldehyde to their meat, have never quite come on board. In Britain, food regulations currently allow only herbs, spices and vegetable seasonings to be irradiated. Still, the industry continues to campaign for the technology's eventual widespread introduction.

In the meantime, its scientists have devised a whole other tool kit with which to keep foods on the shelves for longer. Their techniques range from high-pressure processing (HPP), which might blast your orange juice with pressures up to 150,000 pounds per square inch, to pulsed electric field (PEF) technology, which subjects fresh foods to bursts of high-voltage electricity. Both prevent bacteria from reproducing without destroying the food's texture or taste - so expect more of your ready-meals to be blasted and zapped in future.

Scientists at Kraft Foods, the multinational whose brands range from Philadelphia cream cheese to Kenco coffee, foresee a time soon when a food package itself will signal when its contents are no longer edible. 'We call it smart packaging,' says Manuel Marquez-Sanchez at Kraft's NanoteK consortium, an alliance of 15 universities exploring how nanotechnology can aid food production. 'With a combination of tiny sensors and activators built into it, the pack will know if something is wrong, and correct itself or warn the consumer. It might have anti-microbial properties that can detect microorganisms - which extends a food's life.'

Nanotechnology involves manipulating matter at the molecular level to create entirely new materials and microscopic machines (a nanometre, is a billionth of a metre). The food industry is already getting excited at the prospect of tiny nanotechnology robots, or 'nanobots'. 'Instead of harvesting grain and cattle for carbohydrates and protein, nanobots could assemble the desired steak or flour from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms present in the air as water and carbon dioxide,' Marvin Rudolph, director of DuPont Food Industry Solutions, which advises ingredients companies, predicted breathlessly in Food Technology magazine. No need, then, to nurture such inefficient and expensive food sources as cows and plants, if new industrial processes can simply replicate their atomic structures in pre-flavoured shrink-wrapped packages. But Dr Rudolph's vision went further: 'Nanobots present in foods could circulate through the blood system, cleaning out fat deposits and killing pathogens,' he suggested. In other words, these new industrial creations could actually promise to benefit human health. How useful would that be to an industry seeking to deflect public concern over obesity?

Manuel Marquez-Sanchez, too, has big hopes for nanotechnology. By manipulating ingredients at the nano level, and storing them in 'nanocapsules', he believes that Kraft will be able to devise such treats as an interactive, customisable drink. 'The idea is that everyone buys the same drink, but you'll be able to decide its colour, flavour, concentration and texture,' he explains enthusiastically. 'Once you have a technology to design nanocapsules, based on food-grade materials, you can offer products that put the consumer in control.' Although the industry, one presumes, will wish to retain control of everything from labelling requirements and costs to the degree of prior safety testing.

Dr Marquez-Sanchez, who works from Kraft's labs in Illinois, will not say which brands of drink he is working on, but he admits that Kraft is certainly looking to bring the resulting products to market. 'It's definitely possible,' he says. To show how serious he is, he mentions a 'shake gel' that he has developed - a drink which becomes thicker or more watery according to how hard it is shaken. 'You can choose how thick you want it - and the beautiful part is that if you change your mind it's reversible.' The tiny polymers that cause the effect are not yet food grade, but that hurdle, he says, could be overcome within two years. And by using ultrasound or radio frequencies to trigger these nanocapsules, we could determine the colour, fragrance or taste of our fruit drink or wine.

The Kraft vision is not universally welcomed. Pat Mooney, executive director of the Canadian technology watchdog the ETC Group, has particular worries about the damage that nanoparticles might do to our bodies or to the wider environment - seeping into rivers as tiny pesticide particles from farmed fish, or damaging our brains as they bypass the human immune system. 'Once you get below 100 nanometres in size, all the characteristics of an element change,' he explains. 'We just don't know what it will mean for human health. Nanoparticles can enter the body's cells, and at 30 nanometres can pass the blood-brain barrier. Kraft's packaging materials and drinks-with-100-flavours could be great - but what happens to the nanoparticles you don't want when you drink a glass? Are you sure they'll pass through your body safely? And what do they do to the environment afterwards? There are big safety questions, but nobody's regulating it.'

But Marquez-Sanchez says that his job is simply to uncover the knowledge, and to leave others to decide how to use it. 'I'm a scientist,' he says. 'I used to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the knowledge developed there might be used to develop a nuclear bomb. But it might also lead to the use of cobalt-60 [in radiotherapy] to kill tumours. You have a choice.'

Few organisations have shaped food technology as much as Nasa and its well-resourced friends at the US Army's research labs at Natick, Massachusetts. The space programme is directly responsible for spin-offs such as water filters and softeners, enriched baby food, portable cooler-warmers, and freeze-dried ingredients; Nasa money has also accelerated the development of microwave ovens and irradiated food. So if today's research successfully enhances food provision in a future space mission, there is a very good chance that it will become available in supermarkets tomorrow.

The current challenge at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, is to produce food that will still be edible years from now. Michele Perchonok, a food scientist in the Advanced Food Technology unit, has studied the emerging food-preservation techniques, from high-pressure processing and pulsed electric fields to radio-frequency sterilisation and oscillating magnetic fields. The Army, she says, has developed a sandwich that is still edible after seven years, although Dr Perchonok has not yet tasted it ('the quality isn't as good as you'd like to see,' she explains). Still, her own mission is only marginally less daunting: to ensure that food sent with the Mars mission will survive three to five years in space.

Because these new preservation techniques replace conventional high-temperature heat processing, the space crews will enjoy food that, according to Perchonok, retains more of its taste and nutrients. 'That's the fascination with these new technologies,' she says. 'We're going to have higher-quality food - and the benefits could come to consumers.' She pauses briefly. 'The question, I suppose, is do we really need food that lasts for three years?'

The food industry is always looking for new ways to push back their products' use-by dates. If there is less wastage when items are being shipped across the world, and weeks-old fruit can still appear 'fresh' at the checkout, then producers see the results in their profits. Much of the buzz today surrounds 'modified atmosphere processing' and 'active packaging', in which meat or lettuce leaves are flushed with antimicrobial gases, washed in chlorine, or wrapped in packages lined with chemicals such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) or tertiary-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) - some of which are suspected carcinogens. But it is one thing to make a bagged pre-washed salad last an extra month; will supermarkets really want 'shelf stability' of three or four years?

'It's almost intuitive for the human race to want to eat fresh food,' argues Richard Young, policy adviser to the Soil Association. 'I accept that it's been one of the great successes of agriculture in the last century to extend the range of produce we can enjoy out of season - but when you've got shelf lives going even into a second year, it seems we're moving into an area where the risks outweigh the benefits.' The big danger of the modern food industry, he adds, is 'that the rate of change is occurring on a completely different scale to anything in human evolution. And we're not giving ourselves any time to adjust to any problems that we can't yet see.'

There is way to predict the direction that food technology is likely to take: follow the money. And as more of us look to improve our health, the market is booming for 'functional' or 'nutraceutical' foods that claim to enhance our wellbeing. In Geneva last week, where the 'nutraceutical' and 'cosmeceutical' industries gathered for the Vitafoods International convention, much was made of the $6.3 billion that the sector is already said to be worth. Among the exhibitors seeking their share were the manufacturers of Xlim, 'the drink idea for figure awareness'.

But it's the multinationals who will dominate this revolution. Kellogg's has cereals and pasta containing psyllium, a grain said to help lower cholesterol; Nestlé has joined L'Oréal, to produce dietary supplements that claim to 'improve the quality of skin, hair and nails by supplying nutrients essential to their physiology'.

At the factory level, these growing demands mean finding new ways to obtain health-enhancing ingredients on an industrial scale: rather than rely on fish to produce the omega-3 fatty acids that benefit our hearts, for instance, the omega-3s can now be sourced straight from algae. But it also means introducing new health-focused marketing claims for food prod ucts that may owe more to old-fashioned hype. Will SkinCola, the new 'cellular renewal' drink marketed as 'the first skincare beverage', really promote 'beautiful clear skin' through ingredients such as 'activated oxygen and Z-Bec, a combination of zinc and vitamins'?

Julian Mellentin, who co-wrote The Functional Foods Revolution and analyses the industry for the newsletter New Nutrition Business, is sceptical of some of the more visionary claims. Beyond the new scientific findings about the benefits of naturally healthy foods (such as broccoli and wholegrains), he sees functional foods as remaining a niche area for some time.

What, though, if all these nutritional advances were combined with the genetic revolution that has finally cracked the human genome? What if your GP used your genetic profile to design you a customised diet that included nutraceuticals that could give you a longer, healthier life?

'It's not a question of whether, but when,' according to Jim Kaput, a biotechnologist at the University of California at Davis and a leading figure in the field of 'nutritional genomics', or 'nutrigenomics'. So convinced is Dr Kaput that we will one day be eating personalised foods to fight our genetic predispositions that he has become president of a Chicago biotech company called NutraGenomics.

The reason that so much dietary advice in the news appears to be contradictory, Kaput claims, is that we all respond to foods according to our own individual DNA patterns. 'The organic, vegetarian-hippy types say that if it's natural, it's good for you, and you should have it every day,' he says. 'That's not right. We're self-dosing, and we don't know how foods such as ginseng will affect us long-term. Yes, we're all going to die - but we want to live a little longer.' And science will be there to help.

'We're going to make that diet-gene connection,' Kaput says, 'linking specific nutrients to health in each individual. In 10, maybe 15 years, we'll be able to do genetic tests that will allow us to tweak your diet, so that you will be given dietary supplements according to your dietary profile. And in 25 years, if society allows it, we'll test babies at birth. Given this genotype, we'll say, here's their optimum diet for maintaining health.'

Once science has revealed our optimum diet, says Kaput, society will have to grapple with the ethics of whether the state should force us to eat the foods that will make us healthier.

Talking to a scientist such as Kaput, so enthralled by the promise of technology, it seems pointless to suggest that naturally grown, unadulterated produce seems to have served human health pretty well over the centuries. Yet does have a point when he highlights the gap between what we know about healthy eating, and what we actually choose to eat? The west's trans-fat saturated, synthetically flavoured, salt-packed fast-food diet has been incontrovertibly linked to the rise in type two diabetes and obesity - but it is something we seem unwilling to give up. Considering this government's caution over introducing a 'fat tax', it seems unlikely that its successors will wish to force us to eat greens that suit our genes.

Still, the future will not wait. Jozef Kokini, director of the Centre for Advanced Food Technology at at Rutgers University, agrees with Jim Kaput that our dietary choices will become far more 'intelligent'. 'Fifteen years ago, the idea of making food choices that are optimal for each one of us personally sounded like science fiction,' he says. 'Today it's real science. The personal diet will prevent cancer and increase your lifespan and your quality of life.'

Food science, Dr Kokini adds, is in the midst of a revolution, with 'truly an explosion' in new ideas. 'You'll find foods that are better designed in terms of health prevention attributes, oranges that will last three weeks and still be fresh, a bunch of new textures and flavours with mouthfeel you can't even conceive of.' It will, he says, be 'a very exciting time over the next 20 years, a revolution. You'll be amazed.'

And if new revenue streams follow, you can presume the food industry will enthusiastically embrace it. After all, why should science make way for naysayers such as Sue Dengate, at the Food Intolerance Network? 'What all this means is higher doses of cheaper food additives leading to more irritability, restlessness and sleep difficulties,' Dengate says in despair. 'Why can't food technologists just stop mucking around with our food supply?'

Because if anything does go wrong in today's highly globalised industry, it is not just local food supplies that will be affected. 'It's impossible to predict consequences that will eventually flow from new technologies,' warns Richard Young at the Soil Association. 'In the 1950s, antibiotics were widely used as food preservatives before the problems of antibiotic resistance became clear. And who could have predicted that BSE and CJD would result from the animal feed we were using?'

(The Observer Food Monthly, May 16, 2004)

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Interview: Richard Huntingford, Chrysalis Radio (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

RICHARD Huntingford is primed for a fight. With Chris Tarrant finally gone from Capital FM, the man who launched Heart 106.2 in 1995 predicts that within a year his station will be the biggest in London. Not only will it have the most listeners, but with its new sister station, LBC, it will also beat the Capital Group in the race for advertisers. And as you may have noticed from a relentless advertising blitz, he is currently spending £1 million to prove he means business.

It does not bother Huntingford, the enthusiastic chief executive of Chrysalis, that Heart last week slipped back to a 5.8 per cent audience share, half a million listeners behind Capital's 7.9 per cent.

With Johnny Vaughan in the breakfast hot-seat at Capital, he is convinced that Heart's Jono Coleman and Harriet Scott will shortly zoom ahead. "Chris Tarrant's departure has certainly fired a starting gun for a very interesting race for supremacy," he says with a confident grin. "Well, we enjoy a good scrap, and are looking forward to taking on Capital and hopefully taking the crown off them."

Heart, tipped for success at tonight's Sony Radio Awards, briefly overtook Capital in the ratings last October, but it is Tarrant's departure, Huntingford says, that offers "a fantastic opportunity".

"He's been the glue who's held together a big swathe of their listenership, but we always felt that it would take 12 months after the change for people to choose new breakfast habits," he explains. "Remember, something like half of Tarrant's listeners were over 35, and Johnny Vaughan is clearly targeted at a much younger demographic. We expect a number of those people will not find the Vaughan show to their liking, and will alight on us."

Huntingford will only say of Vaughan's performance that "he is a professional broadcaster who's got a good production team". But more likely to rankle executives at Capital is his pledge that Chrysalis's radio sales team will soon provide greater opportunities than Capital's for advertisers.

LBC, which Chrysalis bought 18 months ago, has more than doubled its audience reach to 4.3 per cent, and is forecast to become profitable next year. By next summer, Huntingford says, further growth will enable his group to offer advertisers access to more listeners than Capital's portfolio. He includes those of Jazz FM, whose advertising Chrysalis sells.

At Capital's Leicester Square studios, the war-talk provokes disbelief. The group declares that it would be "inappropriate" for its chief executive, David Mansfield, to bother responding to such assertions - although he recently accused Chrysalis in an interview of "running scared". But off the record, sources there sneer that Huntingford "has a very strange way of looking at the numbers", and of misrepresenting Vaughan's target audience.

"This is the ninth period in a row when Capital's figures have gone up, meanwhile Heart's have been going down," asserts one (Chrysalis disputes the figures). "Wouldn't he be better off paying attention to keeping the number two position - Classic FM is almost overtaking Heart's market share - before he thinks about us?"

But Huntingford, 48 on Friday, will not be swayed. "We're not running scared," he insists. "We're actually having a very fine time of it." What matters to this former accountant are the numbers - and LBC's revenues alone, he points out, have risen by 31 per cent since January.

His own finances, too, have been rather healthy of late: Chrysalis, chaired by its founder Chris Wright, last year paid him £508,000, and he has a £1 million three-year incentive plan. David Mansfield, meanwhile, was on a mere £487,000 ...

Financial prosperity for the radio industry as a whole, Huntingford suggests, will follow the crossmedia consolidation he hopes is about to begin. TV companies, he believes, must be allowed to take over Britain's radio networks to enable them compete with the BBC.

"We have to take audience share from the BBC," he says. "They promote the hell out of their radio and TV offerings on both media, and it's not a level playing field. You can see a scenario where ITV will wonder where the next phase of growth is going to be, and decide it is to be a cross-media TV and radio company. And that would be good news for the whole commercial radio industry."

In the meantime, Huntingford thinks that LBC can play its part in battling the BBC's dominance. "The goal is to be the number one speech station in London," he declares. So as well as taking on Capital, he thinks that LBC, with all its troubled history, can suddenly beat Radio 4 for London's attention?

"It's a long-term vision," he smiles, "but I'd say we're off to a good start."

(Evening Standard, May 12 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Google's IPO/Unfair pricing

By David Rowan

IF YOU HAVE ever sought inspiration from visionary business books, I suggest that you visit the US Securities and Exchange Commission website at www.sec.gov and download one for free. Google's prospectus for its initial share auction is an action-packed primer for the latest creativity-focused business revolution. It is also a stark reminder that the online economy is still in its infancy, with no guarantees as to the long-term winners.

By refusing to build a conventional business, Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have got off to a remarkable start. Their principles of "don't be evil" and "make the world a better place" brought in $962 million (£536 million) last year, almost a third of it from outside the US. Now available in 97 languages, Google has quickly built one of the world's most trusted information businesses. Advertisers provide most of its revenue, but its unbiased search results are testament to the firm's integrity. The inspirational message for other businesses is that contented, thoughtful staff can be your greatest asset.

Googlers (as employees are known) are encouraged to spend a fifth of their time working on whatever creative projects might "improve people's lives". Many of the firm's biggest innovations began in "20 per cent time", from its AdSense advertising programme to its indispensable news-aggregation service.

"Most risky projects fizzle, often teaching us something," the founders say. "Others succeed and become attractive businesses." Staff are also offered free meals, doctors and even washing machines - benefits, the firm has found, "that can save employees considerable time, and improve their health and productivity".

But for all its focus on Google "doing things that matter" for humanity, it is the document's section on "risk factors" that tellingly deflates the hype. "We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business," the founders admit, not merely from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo! but also from smaller online ad and search firms. New ad-blocking technologies could, they say, destroy Google's business model; the growth in non-PC devices could make its web technology irrelevant; and new proprietory document formats could block its searches. Not forgetting malicious hackers, or "index spammers", who undermine its trusted search listings. This, after all, is just a five-year-old start-up in an unsettled business sector. The fraction of its shares due for auction will provide a few billion dollars more for the battle ahead. But think back to the overfinanced "dead certs" of 1999 and reflect where they are today.

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Our crusade continues against absurdly high prices endured by UK consumers. Your e-mails seethe with frustration that, in a global marketplace, we can pay twice as much as Americans for gadgets or software. Eric Roth found the same Garmin GPS navigation device at £100 on Amazon UK, but at half the price on Amazon US; another reader found Bose loudspeakers that cost £170 here on sale for just $158 (£88) plus tax in the US. Even allowing for tax, shipping and exchange rates, the differential looks fishy, especially for downloadable software. We would be delighted to hear any manufacturer's defence (at david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk). Meanwhile, the search continues for your most audacious example of unfair pricing.

(The Times, May 11 2004)

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Interview: Jane Johnson, Closer editor (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

IT is Emap's most successful magazine launch, claiming sales approaching 500,000 after barely 20 months. Closer, the celebrity women's weekly from the team behind Heat, seems to have found the magic circulation formula that has eluded more traditional women's titles. Tonight its editor, Jane Johnson, is tipped to be voted editor of the year at the Periodical Publishers Association awards. But is her secret, as some rivals are sniffily suggesting, simply to have let tabloid newspaper hacks loose in the more respectful world of magazines?

Johnson, a former Sunday Mirror executive editor, certainly wants Closer to "beat the newspapers at their own game" with celebrity exclusives and hard-nosed "real life" features. She raided the News of the World for her deputy, The Sun for her news editor, and the Star for a news reporter - because, as she puts it, "newspaper people have that great drive to find stories".

At first, the doubters told her a magazine could never compete with papers on breaking news. "But since we've proved that we can, people have started to notice us. So now we're attracting more high-profile people who would previously have gone to the papers."

Her list of "scoops" is certainly more red-top than broadsheet. "We had an exclusive on Russell Crowe and Danielle Spencer having a baby, the first big piece with Amy Crowhurst, the controversial 13-year-old mum, and we led the way with the Sadie Frost and Jude Law divorce story," she says, at times even lapsing into tabloidese herself. "We like to think we've busted the myth that magazines can't get those kind of stories."

But the magazine has also taken on some less welcome red-top characteristics: Johnson's "biggest" story so far, Louise Woodward's first interview for six years, led to a Press Complaints Commission wrist-slap after Closer paid Woodward's boyfriend for a photograph (the PCC code prohibits payments linked to convicted criminals). "We did apologise, and explained the situation openly," she explains.

Closer is something of a hybrid, with conventional women's magazine features, such as puzzles and advice columns, 20 pages of television listings, and a combination of celebrity news and "triumph over tragedy" stories. "The most obvious difference with other magazines is the way we mix real life and celebrity, very much as a newspaper does," Johnson says. "Papers have done it for years, but we feel we're the first magazine that does it convincingly." Hence the Heat-style features such as "Cringe! - The pictures celebs would prefer to forget!", alongside headlines such as "I was married to a long-distance bigamist" and a wife's account of her over-tattooed husband "turning himself into a lizard".

"We do need the Madonna-type celebrity story," Johnson explains, "but ordinary people can also be quite extraordinary too. We're bringing those two worlds together, something that has been crystallised by the reality TV phenomenon."

Readers seem to be taking note. In a crowded market, boosted since its launch by New! and Star, Closer's circulation - audited last year at 385,000 - is now said to be storming towards that of Now, at 592,000 the market leader. Many of its sales are at the expense of traditional titles such as IPC's Woman, Woman's Own and Woman's Weekly, between them down by more than 150,000 over 18 months. Johnson, 35, claims to be "reinventing" a moribund market - although IPC provides alternative figures to suggest that the market as a whole is stable, and fully in touch "with what today's woman wants".

Yet the magazine's tone is certainly more hostile than traditional titles to the newsmakers it seeks to bring readers "closer" to. Like Heat, it delights in revealing their flaws - from the paparazzi snaps of Cher wearing a face-pack, to the unflattering pictures of the "morbidly "It's a question of showing the reality, not just the sanitised version of celebrities' lives," Johnson responds. "If people are trading on their perfect image and the reality's different, they need to be taken to task. We act very much like the readers' mates."

Besides, she says, celebrities themselves tell the magazine how much they "love" it. "We ran some paparazzi pictures of Susannah Constantine eating, alongside the headline: 'How not to eat'," she says. "She phoned in to say it was the most hilarious thing she'd ever read. We're not against celebrities - but we definitely don't give them an easy ride."

But what about the "ordinary" women who are mocked by the magazine's sometimes insensitive tone, particularly over diet-related issues? This week's knowing interview, for instance, with Callie Rogers, the 17-year-old Lottery winner - whose "dramatic weight loss" had resulted in "gazelle-like limbs" thanks to a "mystery illness", clearly implied as anorexia.

Johnson denies that such coverage is "nasty" or exploitative. "She wanted to do that interview as there had been a lot of negative 'anorexia' pieces in the papers that she was quite hurt by," she says. "And she chose Closer. I think she'll be pleased with the result."

DIET is one of the magazine's more consistent topics, from features about a threestone woman who became a glamour model, to extracts from Carol Vorderman's latest recipe book. Isn't this obsessive coverage merely adding to women's anxieties?

"I think we're enabling a lot of women to feel, if they aren't happy about their weight, that there's a way of dealing with it that's not scary or awful," Johnson answers. "Diet is a definite preoccupation women have. We're reflecting what the modern woman thinks about and talks about."

It may seem odd that the job of "shaking up" women's magazines, as she puts it, should have gone to an Oxford English graduate with a penchant for TS Eliot. But Johnson - who started with a graduate job on the Southport Star, and rose from jobs on Chat and Bella to be the Mirror's women's editor - refuses to accept that she has contributed to a "dumbing down" of the sector.

"What we're doing is modernising the women's market," she says. "We've just made it more exciting. It's all about raising your journalistic standards and finding your own stories. That's what we've learned pays off."

(Evening Standard, May 5 2004)

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