Culture, Capitalism, and Horse Meat
Then there are the supermarket chains, now engaged in frantic damage control. The inexorable rise of the grocery giants has been good for consumers in many respects, giving them access to a range of products that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago, and at affordable prices. But they’ve also spawned a tangled web of suppliers and processing firms, and while there is no suggestion that retailers selling beef products knew them to be adulterated, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that they didn’t ask too many questions of their suppliers. As long as the products were cheap, perhaps no one wished to investigate.
However, the supermarkets wouldn’t have flourished if people weren’t buying what they were selling; a good deal of responsibility for the current crisis must lie with consumers who have been demanding ever-cheaper and more processed food without considering how it might be possible. Further, this has not primarily been a matter of saving money, but instead a matter of convenience. Anyone inclined to do so could live well on fresh food for the same or for less than they would spend on all but the cheapest ready meals. Many people simply can’t be bothered to buy and cook fresh food. They are entitled to choose that lifestyle, but they shouldn’t be all too surprised that some immoral actors in the industry would exploit a lax consumer.
The usual suspects on the left have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on “unregulated” free-markets, capitalism, and the entire British Conservative party, as if there were no such things as corruption and dishonesty under communism and socialism. Attacks on the free market also ignore that Europe’s single market was already a long way from being “free,” and employ the strawman that conservatives are against all regulation. Indeed, it appears the problem isn’t a lack of regulation, but the ineffectiveness of enforcement.
Predictably, some have leapt aboard the scandal to demand that it’s time for us all to go vegetarian. You would think our food was being adulterated with iron filings, or as was the case in China a few years ago, with melamine, rather than with small amounts (in most cases) of meat that is not substantively different from the product it purports to be. Also, horse is widely eaten in other countries (horse meat is, by all accounts, a bit sweeter than beef and more gamey; I haven’t — knowingly — tried it myself).
Perhaps only the actual cuts of meat, and not 'meat products' ?
But quite apart from that the problem is, like with the US fish scandal that's ongoing, that the products are mislabeled.
And in many countries, that people are sold cheap horsemeat as expensive beef (beef can cost 2-3 times as much as horse in the EU).
Hence the fraud investigations, not public health and safety.
More seriously, I just don't get this whole cow = acceptable meat / horse = unacceptable meat thing.
I see that as just a progression of the same inclinations that people have in developing emotional ideas regarding pigs or something - specifically when they are not in direct contact with the animals being raised for meat.
I blame Disney...but anyway....
Horses, like cows, are livestock. Useful livestock, to be sure, but still livestock.
I mean, I grew up in a rural area and I've eaten fish, fowl, cow, sheep, pig, deer, bear, snake, alligator.....what makes a horse so special?
Oh, and I've eaten horse too....
The only question in my mind is where are the slaughterhouses getting the horses from?
I would think anyone who saw their horse as a pet would have greater love for them than to send them off to a slaughterhouse when they outlived their usefulness. Aside from any contamination from drugs, that is the thing about this story that's bothersome to me.
In my opinion, if people don't like the idea of eating Trigger, then don't order it off of the menu - but I agree at the same time that the menu SHOULD accurately reflect what is actually being served.
What a hypocrit ranter, you, Brits, have no problem to give cows dead animals reduced into powder, even if they are dead horses
Thank you for your mad cows
not only, Swizerland, Luxemburg, Germany... were involved ... bizarrely the horses were romanian, and some Brit too, but these Brit horse had some sanity problem with forbidden medecine remains
It's all due to global free market rules, Companies take their products from the less expensive productors , and it's going worst, today the meat still comes from Europe, what will it be when it will come from a unknown source in Asia... Africa....