Any unforeseen and unstated artifact found in a foodstuff is by definition contamination. We have been relatively good-humoured, and typically British, about the shocking news that popular food products used to feed our families are contaminated with horsemeat. The online community have been happily trading jokes in some form of virtual horse play, an indicator of the generally light-hearted response.
Meanwhile, media outlets, including the BBC, have been full of vox-pops from hardy shoppers mostly arguing those who buy cheap food should be neither surprised, nor dare to complain, that they have been sold contaminated food. I avoid the cheapest products myself and have never been allured by sausages and burgers bulked up with rough matter, but even I accept that those who buy the cheapest goods (particularly given these hard economic times) at the very least are entitled to know the ingredients.
The problem is we do not know what is in our food, and the nature of our diet means we lack the sensual capability to detect what is in our food. What other possible explanation could there be for our apparent willingness to scoff a Findus beef lasagne and not even consider that it may have 100% horsemeat content?
For too long many of us have existed in our shallow Anglo-American dietary paradigm, where the textures of our most popular food are beaten down to a flavourless pulp, blended with filler and supplemented with seasonings and sugar to make them desirable. This is how we consume our sausages - bulked out with rusk, herbs and sugar. We consume our burgers in a similar way. We smother them with ketchup, brown sauce or stuff them in a roll full of condiments, ensuring we can barely taste or feel the texture of the meat potentially poisoning us. This is serious, given that we are potentially eating poo, to put it politely.
An escalation of the horsemeat scandal (Source: Wikipedia)
In his investigation of meat packing factories, Eric Schlosser revealed in his excellent book Fast Food Nation that in order to keep meat-processing costs low, production lines were run at the highest possible speed the workforce could cope with. This led to errors, including the frequent incorrect removals of cow stomachs, resulting in excrement spillages contaminating those retail beef products (2002, p.197; p.203). If you think that sort of thing could not happen here, then consider what your reaction would have been to the possibility of horsemeat contaminated burgers just a couple of months ago.
Schlosser argues that higher standards of meat are demanded by the EU, but this offers little in the form of reassurance. I am fully expecting excrement to be a future development of this current food contamination scandal, reducing the horsemeat issue to a level of comparative triviality. With the news that drug-contaminated horsemeat could have been entering our food chain for at least a year before it was discovered, there is some inevitability that other nasties will also have found their way in undetected.
I have some sympathy for the traders, from the smallest grocers to the largest supermarkets. I am a long-term critic of the largest corporations, but other than around-the-clock monitoring of their supply chain and frequent laboratory testing of their own products, it is difficult to know how they could have prevented this fiasco. They are not entirely blameless though, for their desire to provide us with cheap food leads them to use suppliers prepared to supply goods at a dangerously low demand price.
With some hope, the current food scandal will mark the demise of the race to the bottom in our consumer culture. In the meantime, I suspect there will be more unsavoury food discoveries, inevitable government inquiries and eventually legal actions. Regardless of the level of food poverty in Britain, all consumers have a basic right to know what is in their shopping basket.
