French consumers believe British food is the most unsafe in Europe, while food produced in France is of the highest quality, according to an poll carried out for French producers group ANIA and released on Tuesday. Britain ranked last in a league table of French consumers' confidence in the safety of European foodstuffs, with just one per cent of the 1,000 people interviewed by BVA saying they considered its products to be the safest in Europe. The poll showed 59 per cent of people believed food produced in France was the safest available in Europe. BVA also questioned people on how they viewed U.S. foodstuffs and found just two per cent of people considered these to be the safest. ``Britain is in the very last position and the United States are not in a good position either, penalised by their use of growth hormones, for example,'' ANIA President Victor Scherrer told a news conference. Britain's food safety image in France and other European countries has been damaged in recent years by several high-profile food scares such as the foot-and-mouth and mad cow diseases that hit the country before spreading abroad. But ANIA said it considered the large majority of votes in favour of France to be attributable to French consumer ''chauvinism.'' Germany ranked second in the table with 13 per cent of the vote in the survey carried out in June.
