by BINOY KAMPMARK
I’ll never send my horse through those gates. He won’t end up in a pie in England.
– Ion Hampu, Romanian labourer, The Sun, Feb 12, 2013
Shorts cuts are irresistible. In marketing, they are overwhelming. In the food industry, they have, at times, assumed the force of legal writ. “No artificial flavors or colors,” is less a statement of truth than a slogan on frozen food packages designed to reassure the insecure. To advertise one thing, and serve another; to promise one form of product, but conceal the nature of its contents, is part and parcel of the food industry. But that doesn’t stop one fuming at the discovery of such practices. The righteous and deceived consumer makes a difficult dining companion.
Hence, the horse-in-lasagna scandal in Britain, which goes to show that one of humanity’s most industrious animals can also be an object of trickery at the family, or single dinner table. First, horse meat was found in hamburgers. Then, it was found in lasagna and thereafter in a spaghetti by-product available through the Tesco chain. Ground horse meat has also been found in supermarkets in France and Sweden, and a few German stores have been pulling products for fear of finding the same.
These discoveries, of course, haven’t stopped the John Bull element in Parliament railing against the European Union and those dissimulating continentals with their shaky meat production practices. The Eurosceptics are frothing at supposed conspiracy. Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun is sniggering with its “investigative journalism” after going inside a “grim Romanian slaughterhouse built with EU cash and one of the sources of the horse meat scandal which has rocked Britain”. Never mind that the production of horse meat from that particular concern was a minute 0.5 percent of its entire operations and labeled to boot. Nick Parker, the delightful journalist in question, even had a harsh word for the unfortunate cart pullers: “Knackered old nags were killed and butchered at CarmOlimp abattoir before being sent to France and on to Luxembourg.”
Britain’s Environment Secretary Owen Paterson could see criminals everywhere besieging a pure British food market via a “faith based system that isn’t working”, another salvo aimed at the faceless wonders in Brussels. This, incidentally, from the same chap who sees no problems whatsoever with GM crops, claiming they have “real environmental benefits” (Telegraph, Dec 10, 2012).
British food insecurity may, however stem from sources outside the EU, less a matter of Romanian horse meat exporters than enterprising Mexicans. This has been the inadvertent result of the last animals shipped from the U.S. to Mexico after court judgments led to the closure of the last equine abattoirs in 2007.
According to James Forsyth writing for The Spectator (Feb 13), horse meat exports from Mexico to the EU rose from 1.3 million kg in 2006 to 4.3 million kg in 2007, peaking at 7.4 million kg in 2010. This has made Paterson nervous, given that the horse meat in question comes from animals that were in all likelihood systematically doped for the duration of their not so natural lives. (Britain’s American cousins do that sort of thing.)
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