...with apologies to the Bisto kids |
The horse-burger
scandal has livened up a dull, depressing and freezing week, revealing the deep
vein of satirical humour practised by the twitterati. Samples:
- I prefer my Lidl pony to Tesco burgers
- Waitrose burgers: guaranteed Shergar free
- Waiter: what would you like on your burger sir? Diner: £5 each way.
Well boom boom.
Writing as someone
who lacks the traditional British sentimentality about animals, and particularly
those regarded as pets, I can’t see any difference in principle between eating
different types of quadruped, with two provisos. A) You’re told honestly what
it is you’re eating, and b) you can be reasonably sure it’s free of superfluous
chemicals and disease. Neither of which
condition seems to have been met in the recent cases.
Two possible
culprits have emerged. First, the
government’s passion for deregulation, no-one was surprised to learn, has led
to changes in FSA inspection regimes while cuts to local authority budgets have
led to a substantial reduction in the number of trading standards officers. The
funding for the FSA meat inspection regimes is being cut by £12m over four
years.
Both government and
the Food Standard Agency (FSA – or should that be SFA) have stressed that there
was no danger to public health in the horse-burgers. However, one food analyst challenged the
claim, on the grounds that, in the absence of tests no-one can know if the
horses were diseased or had been treated with veterinary medicines potentially
harmful to humans. And for the future,
according to a leaflet issued by the FSA, "food business operators [are
to] be given greater responsibility" for monitoring the health standards
of food products.
But the second
culprit, it has been argued, is the supermarkets. (Let's
talk horse sense about food | Jay Rayner | Comment is free | The Observer). Rayner points out that while supermarket
bosses talk up their concerns for safety, in an industry dominated by brutal
price competition, cost is everything.
Their dominant position enables the supermarkets to force cost-cutting
deals on their suppliers – which in turn, encourages (some would say forces) those
suppliers to cut corners. And with beef
prices rising at an alarming rate (current beef wholesale prices are around
£3.80 a kilo compared with £1.85 for horsemeat), it’s not hard to see why
substituting the one for the other might appeal to suppliers.
Governments’ ability
to intervene is limited, even supposing they were minded to: any intervention
which led to further increases in the price of food would be seen as electoral
suicide. And as Rayner points out, it’s
easy for the relatively affluent middle classes praise the virtues of shopping
locally where provenance is clear and trustworthy: no-one eats from the economy
range by choice. If identifying the problem
is fairly simple, proposing a practical – and achievable – solution is less
so. It’s an issue to which we’ll return
– frequently – on this site.