So it’s that time of year again, when the industry takes a deep sigh, claps its hands to its head in frustration, and then dusts itself down to take on another newspaper’s inaccurate and scaremongering piece of ‘news reporting.’

In an article last week, self-confessed ‘World’s Greatest Newspaper’, the Daily Express, reported the results of the Pesticides Residue Committee pesticide study, under the factually loose title of ‘New alert over dangers in fruit.’

Well, perhaps the Express isn’t the world’s greatest paper after all, because if they had bothered to read the PRC’s report before they wrote their piece, they would have come across the fact that not one sample of fruit and veg actually overstepped the MRL. But why let that stand in the way of a good story, eh?

The Fresh Produce Consortium’s Nigel Jenney and others have written to the newspaper to complain, but sadly there will be many hundreds of thousands if not millions fewer who read his riposte than who saw the original story.

When national newspapers write stuff like “the results raise fears that pupils as young as four are being exposed to a ‘cocktail’ of cancer-causing chemicals”, it makes you want to put your head in your hands and give up.

But the battle goes on, as it always will.