Applications will be invited later this year for the post of chief executive of a new agency, responsible for food safety — researching, enforcing, advising government and informing the increasingly worried British public.

If your application is successful, you will have the satisfaction of (not before time) bringing the United Kingdom into step with other countries in detaching the regulation of food safety from conflicting agricultural interests and answering to a health ministry. You will control funds transferred from other ministries, plus up to £50 million (US$82 million) levied from the food industry. You will have a powerful hold on the food safety agenda, in contrast, for example, to the fragmented situation in the United States. Because many of the issues are international in scope, you will have the opportunity to set an example to the world in assessing risks to health and, in collaboration with other ministries, the environment. The scientific research you control will be exemplary if (hopefully) unexciting in its attendance to public concerns about, for example, allergenicity from genetic modification. Your power to raid agricultural or other premises where standards are suspected to be lax should give rise to occasional dramas.

You can set new international standards in the access you provide to the public to basic and not so basic facts about food and some of the controversial technologies used in its production — communicating, for example, some sense of perspective of the comparative risks of contracting Salmonella poisoning from uncooked poultry (relatively significant) and digesting genes from genetically modified crops (negligible based on all the evidence so far).

You will need a cool head as you find yourself countering industrial lobbyists in insisting on more research before the introduction of novel foods and as you enrage some green groups with your judgement that some highly unnatural crops have indeed been adequately tested. Your minister can invoke national security and shut you up — a power that may at times need to be resisted. And as the person ultimately responsible for several scientific advisory committees, you should be prepared for sleepless nights as equivocal evidence emerges that, if made publicly available, might bring some part or other of the food industry to its knees.

Still interested?