When it was recently revealed that supermarket beefburgers
had been found to contain horsemeat and that halal meat products were found to
contain traces of pork, I wondered how my late father would have reacted to the
news.
My Dad had opinions on most things and was more than happy
to share them with anyone who would listen, whether they wanted to or not. Even
before his eyesight failed (he suffered macular degeneration from his
mid-sixties) my Dad would listen avidly to the radio, which was normally tuned
to Radio 4 or LBC; news, current affairs and phone in programmes were his
particular favourites and he usually had some view or other, sometimes quite
extreme, about the topics that were broadcast. This quite often led to him
discussing these points of view with me. I think it best to refer to these
discussions as healthy debates with a frank and fair exchange of views. I must
confess that on occasion, even when I agreed with him, I would take the
opposite point of view for entertainment if nothing else.
All things medical fascinated my Dad, especially the links
between health, diet and nutrition and food in general. One of the programmes
that he listened to regularly on LBC featured Michael van Straten, an
osteopath, naturopath, acupuncturist and nutritional consultant and advocate of
healthy eating. While not quite following a macrobiotic diet, my Dad was keen
to eat healthily; he eschewed red meat to a large extent, preferring white meat
or fish. He was most definitely not a proponent of fast food or convenience
food or of any highly processed food. On these subjects he normally had a
strong view, for instances on most breakfast cereals: “You’d be better off
eating the packet,” and on sausages which he described as “Bags of mystery.” I
can rarely if ever recall him eating a sausage and I certainly can’t recall him
eating a hamburger. So I’m sure he would have felt that the recent revelations
of horsemeat in certain supermarket beefburgers and to a lesser extent the news
of cross contamination with pork in halal meats vindicated his avoidance of
convenience foods.
Sausages were dubbed “little bags of mystery” by the
Victorians, who were sceptical of what they contained and suspected the
presence of rather a lot of horsemeat. Today’s convenience foods would have
given the Victorians plenty of scope for criticism. Adulterating food with
unexpected ingredients is nothing new and history has many examples of foods being
padded with patently harmful substances. Nowadays some of the substances added
to foods may be defined as harmful; it depends on how prepared you are to
ingest a wide range of chemicals that probably do little damage in small doses
but are likely to cause long term damage if consumed on a regular basis. The most
worrying element of this story is that there may be a significant risk that the
horsemeat that has entered the human food chain was either tainted by harmful
drugs administered to the animal while it was alive or in the method of its
slaughter.
In 2005, the 5 biggest horse meat-consuming countries were
China, Mexico, Russia, Italy, and Kazakhstan but generally there is a taboo
about the eating of horse and it is more the taboo than anything else that
exercises us in this instance; that and the deception. There’s nothing
intrinsically wrong in eating horse and assuming that it is prepared properly
nothing unhealthy either. A key factor in our outrage, apart from any health
issues that I’ve alluded to above, is the deception. If people were accepting
of eating horse and it was advertised and sold as such then those of us who
preferred not to might accept that; what we can’t accept is one thing sold as
another. Of course the whole affair begs the wider question around mass food
production. Under what conditions are any of our staple food animals kept? How
are they treated and slaughtered? How clean and hygienic are the factories
where the carcasses are prepared before arriving in our supermarkets? On the
whole most of us probably adopt an “out of sight, out of mind” approach when
buying meat in the supermarket, until of course some TV documentary exposes
conditions in some meat packing plant. More seriously, how much cross
contamination is there with ingredients that we don’t want to eat for religious
or cultural reasons. In some cases, and I’m thinking of suffers from allergies
and food intolerances here, cross contamination can have serious health
implications.
Since nut allergies are pretty common and can be fatal,
we’re all familiar with warnings about products that may contain nuts or have
been produced in a factory where nuts are processed, but there are plenty of
other instances where foods contain unexpected extras. Many years ago I
suffered an allergy to chicken; it brought me out in hives which was
inconvenient and uncomfortable but no more than that. Now chicken should be
reasonably easy to avoid if you don’t want to eat it, but I sometimes had
reactions after eating other things, whereupon a quick read of the ingredients
would reveal “Other meats” (undefined but quick obviously chicken).
Convenience food consumption in the UK is big business and
while a reasonable person will be aware that the ingredients in ready meals, burgers
and sausages will not comprise the highest quality meat, we all have a
reasonable expectation that it will at least have come from the right animal. A
major reason for low quality or (as we now find) fraudulent meat in convenience
foods is financial. As a nation we have become accustomed to relatively low
food prices. Research undertaken by the housing charity Shelter reveals that if
food prices had risen at the same rate as house prices in the period since
1971, we would now be paying £8.47 for a bunch of six bananas, £10.45 for four
pints of milk and £53.18 for a leg of lamb. I’m not entirely convinced that
comparing hose prices and food prices is especially valid and Shelter’s point
was aimed more at the lack of affordable housing than the relative cheapness of
food, but in reality food price increases in the same proportion as those in
other markets would cause public outcry so naturally food producers need to
contain costs while still making profits.
Each new day seems to bring further examples of horsemeat
contamination of beef products, although as Findus admit that up to 100% of the
meet in their lasagne was horse, the word contamination is scarcely strong
enough. We’ve ended up in this situation for two reasons. One is greed and the
pursuit of profit on the part of all of the parties in the production and
distribution of these products which results in the cheapest cuts of meat being
sourced. As profit margins are trimmed to the bone[1]
it becomes inevitable that the raw material will be of the cheapest, lowest
quality possible. Secondly there has to be some responsibility on the part of
the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Lamentably they only appear to have become
involved in this affair after the event when really they should have been
acting as guardians of food quality and preventing horsemeat entering the food chain,
not wringing their hands and only acting now, a classic case of closing the
stable door after the horse has bolted. [2]
I may be wrong but I suspect the FSA to be one of those organisations where bureaucrats
outnumber the inspectors and testers. This appears to be borne out by the fact
that it was tests carried out by the Ministry of Justice rather than the FSA
that identified the pork in halal products, a story which incidentally appears
to have been lost in the avalanche of news about horsemeat.
The whole episode raise questions of how much do we know
about what we eat? When it comes to convenience food the answer has to be very
little. We have to take on trust that what the manufacturer says is in the
product actually is in the product and at the moment it’s clear that in a great
many cases they aren’t worthy of our trust.
Furthermore the news we have been hearing evokes the “mad
cow disease” (bovine spongiform encephalopathy
or BSE) scare of the 1980’s and ‘90’s when beef products of all types were
being cleared from supermarket shelves; certainly I recall that my Dad reduced
what little beef he consumed at the time to virtually nothing. But the BSE
epidemic did not translate itself into the widespread incidence of nvCJD
(new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) in humans as had been feared and beef
consumption recovered. Over time our society’s reliance on and love of
convenience foods will mean that this scandal will be a mere footnote in history
like all of the others, past and future.
I say past and future
because if history tells us anything it is that this will be repeated in some
way or another. There will be plenty of people smugly declaring that they never
eat burgers, or microwaveable lasagne, but they may rest assured that lurking
somewhere in their fridge, freezer or larder is another food scandal time bomb
waiting to explode. Next time it might be chicken or farmed fish or pork or
lamb, but whatever it is, rest assured there will be a next time.
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