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February 19, 2013 |
By now you’ve likely heard about the
horse meat scandal that is rocking Europe. As far as food scandals go,
this one is intriguing. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve
learned that the meat we buy may not be everything we thought it was.
Remember "pink slime"? The only good news here is that, so far, it
doesn’t seem to be an imminent health threat, although it does raise
some very alarming questions.
As food politics expert Marion Nestle wrote,
“The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study
in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. Cultural
identity? They (other people) eat horsemeat. We don’t.”
As
Nestle explains, “Most Americans say they won’t eat horsemeat, are
appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling
their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.” Horse meat,
however, is eaten in
numerous countries around the world like China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as countries in Europe, including France and Switzerland.
It’s
one thing to knowingly eat horse meat; it’s quite another to have it
slipped into your food. This opens a pandora’s box of questions about
the food we're buying. For starters: What else is in there (donkey and
pig, and the list may grow)? What does it reveal about food safety and
our complex food chain? Who is responsible for duping consumers, and how
did they get away with it?
It turns out there is a lot we can learn from Europe’s surplus of horse burgers.
1. The Mighty Fall
The
most recent news surfacing today is that Nestlé, one of the largest
food companies in the world, has now been entangled in the scandal. The
New York Timesreports
that Nestlé is pulling two products sold in Italy and Spain: Buitoni
Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, as well as Lasagnes à la Bolognaise
Gourmandes sold to catering companies in France.
Nestlé
is just the latest in the list of Europe’s top food companies involved.
The story first broke in the UK and Ireland when major supermarket
chains Tesco and Aldi were found to be selling beef products that
contained horse meat. It spun from there.
AdAge reports,
“Burger King binned thousands of Whoppers and Angus Burgers, which were
sourced from the same Irish beef supplier, Silvercrest, and Findus
‘beef’ lasagna was found to contain 100% horse meat.”
Silvercrest has been fingered, as well as Liffey Meats in Ireland and Dalepak in Yorkshire,
accordingto Felicity Lawrence of the
Guardian:
Silvercrest and Dalepak are both subsidiaries of ABP Food Group, one of the largest beef processors in Europe.”
...
Huge blocks of frozen meat at a cold store in Northern Ireland, Freeza
Foods, which had been quarantined by officials suspicious of its
labelling and state of packaging, were found to contain 80% horse.
Other
top food companies were implicated when the scandal hit France (more on
that soon), but the presence of large food companies at the heart of
the issue is troubling. While bigger companies are often able to offer
products cheaper than small and local stores, some may be questioning if
the savings are really worth it if consumers are getting duped. A look
at the complex supply chain raises even more fears.
Supermarket
buyers and big brands have been driving down prices, seeking special
offers on meat products as consumers cut back on their spending in the
face of recession. The squeeze on prices has come at a time when
manufacturers' costs have been soaring. Beef prices have been at record
highs as has the price of grain needed to feed cattle. The cost of
energy, heavily used in industrial processing and to fuel centralised
distribution chains, has also soared. There has been a mistmatch between
the cost of real beef and what companies are prepared to pay.
So, are we really shocked?
2. A Tangled Web
Horse
meat has ended up in so-called beef products to varying degrees — some
have been found to contain traces of horse DNA, which may have been the
result of processing plants not properly cleaning equipment. And some
products have been found to contain upward of 80 to 100 percent horse
meat, which signals a much larger problem.
Getting to
the bottom of how this came about has involved a lot of finger pointing.
In Ireland, the ABP Food Group blamed supplies in Netherlands and
Spain, and later Poland. “Five weeks into the scandal and the links in
the Irish chain have still not been fully established,”
writes the
Guardian's Lawrence.” But this gets even more interesting in France, as she
explains:
Comigel
had subcontracted its ready meal production to a factory in Luxembourg,
Tavola. It was supplied with meat by a company called Spanghero.
Spanghero had bought meat from a Dutch fraudster already convicted of
passing horse off as beef, Jan Fasen.
The
Dutch trader ran a company called Draap, which spelled backwards is
paard or Dutch for horse. It was registered in Cyprus in 2008, with an
offshore vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. It emerged during
Fasen's trial in Holland that he had supplied French companies with
horsemeat imported from South America and Mexico fraudulently labelled
as Dutch and German "beef" going back to 2007.
The
horsemeat found in the recent tests on ready meals exported from France
was said to have been sourced by Draap from Romania. The Romanian
government has said its meat was legally exported correctly labeled as
horse. The French government said Spanghero was the first agent to stamp
the horse as beef; Spanghero has denied doing so deliberately. Fasen
says Spanghero and French manufacturers were in on the deception from
the beginning.
It turns out there may be a whole lot more criminal to this case.
3. Trouble in Romania
It just so happens that Romania may have an excess of dead horses on its hands. John Lichfield of the Independent reports that a change in traffic rules is to blame:
Horse-drawn
carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but
hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the
abattoir after the change in road rules.
The
law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also
banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among
food-industry officials in France that some of the “horse meat” which
has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may,
in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. “Horses have been banned from
Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the
slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers
who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture
committee.
While the explanation of where
some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it
got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield
explains,
“It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working
through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France
which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it
into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”
4. Blame the Mafia
From here, the story just gets weirder. Jamie Doward reports for the
Observer that organized international gangs are suspected of involvement in the scandal. Doward
writes:
Experts within the horse slaughter industry have told the Observer
there is evidence that both Polish and Italian mafia gangs are running
multimillion-pound scams to substitute horsemeat for beef during food
production. There are claims that vets and other officials working
within abattoirs and food production plants are intimidated into signing
off meat as beef when it is in fact cheaper alternatives such as pork
or horse. ...
"I'm concerned
that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we've really
got to get to the bottom of it," [Britain’s environment secretary Owen
Paterson] said.
5. Rethinking Our Food
So,
we found out that beef products may contain horse, and also pig, and
possibly donkey, as well. What to do with that information? For some
people, it means buying less meat or from different sources. Reuters
reported
that 60 percent of people it surveyed in the UK said they were turning
to local butchers for their meat and 25 percent said they would buy
different cuts instead of processed meat.
AdAge reported
that sales of frozen burgers dropped 40 percent in the beginning of
February, while the meat-substitute Quorn saw a spike in sales of 10
percent. Emma Hall
writes that, “More than two-thirds of British adults said they would be less likely to buy frozen meat products in the future.”
The
biggest effect so far has been a drop in public trust. But after
countless food safety scandals over the years, some of them deadly, why
do we trust a system that’s needlessly complex?
“The food and retail industries have become highly concentrated and globalized in recent decades,” Lawrence
writes for the
Guardian:
“A
handful of key players dominate the beef processing and supermarket
sectors across Europe. They have developed very long supply chains,
particularly for their economy lines, which enable them to buy the
ingredients for processed foods from wherever they are cheapest at any
point, depending on exchange rates and prices on the global commodity
markets. Networks of brokers, cold stores operators and subcontracted
meat cutting plants have emerged to supply rapidly fluctuating orders
‘just in time.’ Management consultants KPMG estimate there are around
450 points at which the integrity of the chain can break down."
That’s worth repeating — there are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands.
If
there was ever a reason to eat more locally produced food and to know
where your food comes from and who grows and processes it, this would be
a damn good one because this extends far beyond just meat products, and
far beyond Europe.
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