Pret a danger

Each year, about ten people in Britain die from allergic reactions to food. The case of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died after eating a sandwich from Pret a Manger, was a nasty reminder of how allergies can claim young lives at any moment. But it also raises a difficult question: to what extent are businesses that serve food culpable? Why do so many people, after this case, want to blame Pret and only Pret?

It’s territory with which I am familiar, as a mother of two children with severe allergies. When Alastair, my son, was eight years old we attended one of the first allergy clinics at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. They inserted small slivers of chicken, turkey and pheasant into cuts in his arms and measured the allergic reaction. Diagnosis: instantaneous. Treatment? None. Avoidance is the only answer — no vaccinations, no pills or surgery. We left with an Epipen and a sense of foreboding.

I started obsessively reading the food labels on products, which have much improved over the years. In spite of constant vigilance, I made mistakes. Who knew that a ham sandwich could be made of ‘turkey ham’? We learnt the hard way that roast potatoes are now often cooked in goose fat. So even when I was buying everything for my son myself, casting a paranoid eye over everything he ate, mistakes crept in. We needed to make sure that we had the Epipen at the ready.

I wished for a magic wand that I could wave over a food product and it could tell me if it was safe. So I did my best to invent one. The result was Foodwiz, one of the first health apps. Consumers could scan the barcode of any food item for their allergy. My local MP, Matt Hancock, supported my amateur efforts to bring it onto the market.