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When the National Lending Library for Science and Technology was set up in 1960 one of its key concerns was with the formation of a comprehensive stock of Russian scientific periodicals, and, to complement this, a comprehensive stock of Russian scientific and technical monographs. The increased interest of Western scientists in Russian science and technology, brought about particularly by the successful Russian space programme, assured a demand for this material.

A re‐opening of negotiations for Britain, either unilaterally or with other States, to enter the European Economic Community appears distinctly likely in the coming year. It is more than four years since we discussed, in these columns, the subject of the Common Market and its possible effects on food standards and legislation generally, if Britain linked its economic fortunes and future with the Community. The main obstacles at the time were a chariness to accept the full implications of the Treaty of Rome and the agricultural policy of France. In fact, one gained the impression from all the reports that but for the intransigence of France, we might have joined in 1963.

The new Fair Trading measure aims at the establishment of a strong, bioadly‐based central direction of consumer protection; a new Director‐General of Fair Trading with wide responsibilities “for protecting consumers” with authority to “make proposals for the exercise of order‐making powers in relation to trading practices which adversely affect consumer interests”, and “to act against those who persistently follow a course of conduct unfair to consumers”. This supremo is to work closely with the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Restrictive Practices Board, and no less than five junior Ministers are to be given special responsibilities for protecting consumer interests, handling these aspects of the new system in their own departments.

This paper applies the directional distant function and the meta-frontier to analyze the efficiency and technology gap ratio (TGR) of 20 publicly traded restaurant companies based on the stock market of the United States (US) from 2009 to 2016. The efficiency scores and TGRs are first computed by restaurant types (i.e. quick-service and full-service) and then by marketing strategies (i.e. single-brand and multi-brand). There are three major findings. First, employee utilization has the greatest room for improvement, and restaurant owners and managers should prioritize the improvement of this input. Second, the average TGR of quick-service restaurants (QSRs) is higher than that of full-service restaurants (FSRs), indicating that the inputs of FSRs need to be adjusted in comparison to QSRs. Third, the average TGR is higher in restaurants with a multi-brand strategy in comparison to a single-brand strategy, and the inputs of multi-brand strategy restaurants need to be adjusted accordingly.

The New Year will see Britain a member of the largest multi‐national free trade area in the world and there must be few who see it as anything less than the beginning of a new era, in trade, its trends, customs and usages and especially in the field of labour, relations, mobility, practices. Much can be foreseen but to some extent it is all very unpredictable. Optimists see it as a vast market of 250 millions, with a lot of money in their pockets, waiting for British exports; others, not quite so sure, fear the movement of trade may well be in reverse and if the increasing number of great articulated motor trucks, heavily laden with food and other goods, now spilling from the Channel ports into the roads of Kent are an indication, the last could well be true. They come from faraway places, not all in the European Economic Community; from Yugoslavia and Budapest, cities of the Rhineland, from Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Mulhouse and Milano. Kent has had its invasions before, with the Legions of Claudius and in 1940 when the battle roared through the Kentish skies. Hitherto quiet villagers are now in revolt against the pre‐juggernaut invasion; they, too, fear more will come with the enlarged EEC, thundering through their one‐street communities.

1966 may not prove to be one of the vintage years in the field of food quality control, but it holds the promise of some particularly important developments; for new and improved compositional standards for a number of processed and pre‐cooked foods and a stricter regulation of the description of almost all foods. New Labelling of Food Regulations, more extensive than anything that has gone before, may have been finally made before the end of the year. (The last day for representations in the several divisions of the proposed Regulations was actually this January 13). The Food Standards Committee's recommendations were comprehensive but necessary and it is hoped that the regulations will show no serious whittling away of these recommendations.

Over the years we have reported prosecutions where the defence has alleged, and with circumstantial support that the presence of a harmful foreign body in food was deliberate through the action of a single disgruntled employee or where the labour relations climate generally has been bad. It makes no difference to the manufacturer's responsibility—the offence is an absolute one—but occasionally courts have allowed it in mitigation. Sometimes, it has been the nature of the extraneous material, e.g. fragments of glass or metal, the like of which did not exist in the factory premises or plant. This may be taken as a symptom of the vandalism of the age, but more recently, two incidents have drawn attention to its dangers and provided a glimpse of the criminal mind which can inflict such injury on employers, and expose innocent consumers, of all ages, to possible harm.

In our March issue, we discussed briefly the reappearance of the deficiency diseases among children in parts of this country; particularly rickets and, as far as our own experience goes, mainly among the immigrant peoples. With evidence on every hand of bigger and bonnier babies, school children several pounds heavier and at least two inches taller than the average of a generation ago; stores bulging with foods of every description and the accent always on the health aspect of foods, this news may have been difficult to believe. Now, under the title “Rickets Recurs in British Children”, the May issue of the Practitioner contains a survey of the increasing incidence of rickets among children in the Glasgow area (Arneil, Gavin O., 1964, Pract. 192, 652).

The lengthy review of the Food Standards Committee of this, agreed by all public analysts and enforcement officers, as the most complicated and difficult of food groups subject to detailed legislative control, is at last complete and the Committee's findings set out in their Report. When in 1975 they were requested to investigate the workings of the legislation, the problems of control were already apparent and getting worse. The triology of Regulations of 1967 seemed comprehensive at the time, perhaps as we ventured to suggest a little too comprehensive for a rational system of control for arguments on meat contents of different products, descriptions and interpretation generally quickly appeared. The system, for all its detail, provided too many loopholes through which manufacturers drove the proverbial “carriage and pair”. As meat products have increased in range and the constantly rising price of meat, the “major ingredient”, the number of samples taken for analysis has risen and now usually constitutes about one‐quarter of the total for the year, with sausages, prepared meats (pies, pasties), and most recently, minced meat predominating. Just as serial sampling and analysis of sausages before the 1967 Regulations were pleaded in courts to establish usage in the matter of meat content, so with minced meat the same methods are being used to establish a maximum fat content usage. What concerns food law enforcement agencies is that despite the years that the standards imposed by the 1967 Regulations have been in force, the number of infringements show no sign of reduction. This should not really surprise us; there are even longer periods of failures to comply; eg., in the use of preservatives which have been controlled since 1925! What a number of public analysts have christened the “beefburger saga” took its rise post‐1967 and shows every indication of continuing into the distant future. Manufacturers appear to be trying numerous ploys to reduce the content below the Regulation 80% mainly by giving their products new names. Each year, public analysts report a flux of new names and ingenious defences; eg, “caterburgers” and similar concocted nomenclature, and the defence that because the name does not incorporate a meat, it is outside the statutory standard.