Re: [Fsfe-uk] [OT-ish] Government food data

[Graham Seaman]

Simon Waters wrote: (offlist, but with permission to quote...)

> My days as a civil servant are long gone, but in most cases the 
> control of publications belonged to the director of the relevant 
> branch of the service, who would exercise control of copyright on 
> behalf of the Crown.
>
> In particular the Food Standards Agency inherited the responsibility 
> for maintaining this dataset from MAFF, so if you get no where with 
> HMSO I would suggest writing to the director of the FSA.
>
> Make it clear what you want, raw data in form suitable for input to a 
> computer program, etc etc.
>
> Of course it may make sense for them to control the distribution of 
> the dataset itself, you only care that it is available to users of 
> your program in an agreed format. This might help address issues of 
> timeliness, and accuracy, which are no doubt a concern with such data.
Yes, I wrote to the FSA first, explaining in some detail what I wanted 
and why. They sent me a long (and very quick) response, some relevant 
details from which are:

"The UK does not hold an online food nutrient databank.  UK food 
composition tables are published in the McCance & Widdowson's The
Composition of Foods series."

"The McCance and Widdowson's the Composition of Foods series is not 
available online, although electronic versions are
available from:

  Margaret Ferre
  HMSO, Licensing Division... "

And to add insult to injury:

"You may also be interested to know that there are also a number of
suppliers that provide nutrient analysis software packages, which
include data from McCance & Widdowson's The Composition of Foods series"

"As you are aware USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) have an 
online nutrient database. As you have noted this data is American and will 
not necessarily be typical of foods eaten in the UK."

In other words, why would you want the right to write software when 
you are allowed to pay for commercial software?
If you want more freedom then sod off to America.

:-(

Ironically, the FSA commissioned a survey on how to manage and price the data
a couple of years ago: "/An assessment of issues pertinent to the future 
development of The Composition of Foods/", but that isn't available online either.

Of course it may still be that when I get a reply from the HMSO it will
read 'please feel free to distribute our dataset, or provide a pointer
to this location where it may be freely downloaded'. Pigs may fly.

In the meantime, I'd still like to know what the rest of Europe does.
Anyone?

Graham