Saturday 9 February 2013

Little Bags of Mystery


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.


[1] It has been difficult to write this piece without using lots of food related references; eventually one slipped through.
[2] Sorry, that was difficult to resist.

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