This week the Food Standards Agency announced its first verdict on whether the food giant Unilever should be allowed to put a protein usually found in Atlantic fish into ice-cream. The company says this will make the ice-cream creamier and it has passed the FSA’s first test.

The request for fishy ice-cream is one of many applications that land every day on the desks of a team of FSA scientists and consumers, collectively known as The Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP). If a company wants to use an ingredient that has never been included in food in Europe before, it must apply to the committee. After a couple of years of evaluations the application is either allowed, if it is 100 per cent safe, or denied. Without this protection there would be no check on what was entering our food chain, with potentially dire consequences. The committee pays particular attention to whether the food is safe for children to eat, as their metabolism is different from those of adults.

The committee is now awaiting comments from the public on the Unilever application (visit acnfp.gov.uk, if you want to have your say). Once the public’s views have been canvassed, their opinions are passed to the European Commission for a final verdict.

However, some lobby groups are worried that, despite these measures, consumers are being left in the dark. This is because there is no requirement in law to state on the ice-cream’s label if any of its listed ingredients have been manufactured using genetically modified (GM) techniques, unlike if a product contains GM material, when the manufacturers must say so.

There is a subtle but important difference between using GM techniques and including GM material: the man-made fish protein in the ice-cream has identical DNA to Atlantic fish stocks but is created using a GM technique. Unilever inserts a synthetic copy of fish DNA into a GM yeast. This acts as a “factory” reproducing itself to produce large quantities of the protein.

“GM yeast is exempt from current European regulations, as it is a processing aid. So it doesn’t have to be labelled,” says Alan Malcolm, the chief executive of the Institute of Biology and a former member of the ACNFP. “However, we think it would be a jolly good thing if companies voluntarily told people what was going on.”

Pete Riley of the lobby group GM Freeze agrees that, if GM yeast is used to make a food, companies should say this on the label. “People like to know what they’re buying,” he says.

Last year, GM Freeze asked consumers whether they would want to know if an animal had had GM feed, which also doesn’t have to be marked on a food label under current legislation. Nine out of ten said yes.

Unilever is already using this technology to make ice-cream in the US where they don’t have to mention on the label that the protein has been manufactured using a GM technique.

Dr Nigel Lindner, a scientist from Unilever says that the fish protein will make up less than 1 per cent of the final product. All the information about how the protein is made, he says, is on its website (unilever.com).

“We label according to regulations in any given country. In this particular instance, we produce the ingredient with genetically modified yeast, but there is no GM organism present in the ice-cream. And that means that no GM labelling is required. That’s the same for quite a number of food ingredients that are commonly used in food manufacture these days.”

Although the protein has been allowed in the US, it’s not certain that it will pass over here. The ACNFP is faced with an increasing number of applications for food ingredients that would have been unthinkable a decade ago (see below). Many of the applications made haven’t been successful — for example, iodine-enriched eggs, produced by feeding chickens iodine-rich diets, have been denied the right to be sold in Europe on safety grounds.

Times recommends

• Live chat: Thrifty ways to update your winter wardrobe
• Is anybody out there really listening?
• Nutrition Q&A: Will eating late make me fat?