HORSEMEAT SAGA GALLOPS ON.

Initially, the 'Horsemeat' story seemed to be little more than a bit of nonsense that would quickly vanish from our minds, but now it's assuming much greater proportions.

 

The revelation that some offerings of frozen lasagne, marketed as being based on beef, were almost entirely made of horsemeat is a very different finding to the previous discoveries of minute traces of horse DNA as a contaminant in an assortment of products. We now seem to have a full-scale scandal on our hands, quite possibly involving major criminal activity.

 

In recent years our supermarkets have taken over from small local shops partly through convenience and partly through pricing. More and more they've introduced 'own brands' and 'value ranges', both being euphemisms for 'cheap and cheerful'. Very often such products are of poor quality, meat concoctions being 'bulked-up' with water and an assortment of other fillers in order to keep costs as low as possible. To some extent, the discovery that horsemeat has been used as a cheaper filler, and even as an alternative, to other meats is not that much of a surprise. It's also a direct consequence of the supermarkets' policies of keeping costs as low as possible to the exclusion of all other considerations.

 

I've never tried eating horsemeat but would have no particular objection to giving it a go. I would be a little annoyed, actually rather incandescent, if I bought a packet of beefburgers and subsequently found that they contained no beef; on a very simple level, that would be fraud. On a higher level, there may be people who would have serious objections to ever eating horse just as others would object to eating cat or dog; the issue then becomes one of labelling.

 

One hopes that the perpetrators of the probable fraud will be tracked down and imprisoned, though I'm not holding my breath. That we will then find a huge increase in the costs associated with food testing and labelling is something that will affect all of us as supermarkets spread the increase across their entire ranges. The one thing they won't do, though they should, is to reduce the amount of extraneous muck that is routinely added to their cheapest lines of sausages, burgers, meatballs and prepared items.

 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose !