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| Meat scandal: the price of cheap food | Meat scandal: the price of cheap food |
| (7 months later) | |
| The British are now the fattest people in western Europe. America is ahead of us, and the rest of Europe is not far behind in the march to ever greater obesity, with all the attendant problems of poor health and shortened life expectancy it brings in its train. That is the right context within which to view the amazing brouhaha over horsemeat in the food chain. In the panicky search for crooks and culprits, the bad-mouthing of other countries and the pious pronouncements about deceived consumers, the real issue is all but lost from view. | The British are now the fattest people in western Europe. America is ahead of us, and the rest of Europe is not far behind in the march to ever greater obesity, with all the attendant problems of poor health and shortened life expectancy it brings in its train. That is the right context within which to view the amazing brouhaha over horsemeat in the food chain. In the panicky search for crooks and culprits, the bad-mouthing of other countries and the pious pronouncements about deceived consumers, the real issue is all but lost from view. |
| This is that we have an industrialised food system which, with its relentless pressure to shave fractions of a penny off the price of its products, practically guarantees fraud, substitution and, even when those are absent, a constant driving down of the quality of the raw materials used in processed meals. This food is then eaten by people hooked on cheap, easy and overly plentiful food. And all this would still be true if, by some miracle of improved regulation, not one molecule of horse were ever to appear in a beefburger again. | This is that we have an industrialised food system which, with its relentless pressure to shave fractions of a penny off the price of its products, practically guarantees fraud, substitution and, even when those are absent, a constant driving down of the quality of the raw materials used in processed meals. This food is then eaten by people hooked on cheap, easy and overly plentiful food. And all this would still be true if, by some miracle of improved regulation, not one molecule of horse were ever to appear in a beefburger again. |
| This week's revelations about the nightmarishly serpentine supply chains that snake over Europe, bringing the cheapest available blob of frozen protein from one end of the continent to the other, where it can be further denatured, disguised, and flavour enhanced, have pulled back the curtain on a shadowy world of smuggling and subterfuge. Of course there is nothing innately wrong with long-distance trade in food. Whether in the shape of Roman exports of olive oil and wine, the livestock that was once despatched down the drovers' roads that can still be walked in the British Isles, Danish exports of cattle to the Netherlands, or wheat from the eastern European countries, such trade has been one of the factors that has shaped our civilisation. But what we see now, particularly in the meat business, is too often a degenerate version of what went before. | This week's revelations about the nightmarishly serpentine supply chains that snake over Europe, bringing the cheapest available blob of frozen protein from one end of the continent to the other, where it can be further denatured, disguised, and flavour enhanced, have pulled back the curtain on a shadowy world of smuggling and subterfuge. Of course there is nothing innately wrong with long-distance trade in food. Whether in the shape of Roman exports of olive oil and wine, the livestock that was once despatched down the drovers' roads that can still be walked in the British Isles, Danish exports of cattle to the Netherlands, or wheat from the eastern European countries, such trade has been one of the factors that has shaped our civilisation. But what we see now, particularly in the meat business, is too often a degenerate version of what went before. |
| Ministers wax indignant over the plight of the consumer and lecture the supermarkets, who in turn berate their suppliers. But in truth government, consumers, supermarkets and food manufacturers are all complicit in a process which has impoverished our diet while pretending to enrich it. Graham Harvey, who was the technical adviser to The Archers, a programme which is still residually, among other things, a celebration of an older idea of agriculture, wrote in his book The Killing of The Countryside that in the "great temple" that is the supermarket "the range of products seems vast". But "in reality, few of the food items are even recognisable as farm products". | Ministers wax indignant over the plight of the consumer and lecture the supermarkets, who in turn berate their suppliers. But in truth government, consumers, supermarkets and food manufacturers are all complicit in a process which has impoverished our diet while pretending to enrich it. Graham Harvey, who was the technical adviser to The Archers, a programme which is still residually, among other things, a celebration of an older idea of agriculture, wrote in his book The Killing of The Countryside that in the "great temple" that is the supermarket "the range of products seems vast". But "in reality, few of the food items are even recognisable as farm products". |
| Harvey also writes that "food processors raise the price of eating and reduce the standard of nutrition". It would be foolish to say that all processed food is rubbish. But we eat too much even of the better kind, and far too much of the worse kind. The less well off, on tighter budgets and more often seeing food as a form of consolation, suffer most. The idea that this happens because food companies brainwash us into eating like this, that their profits swell as our waistlines expand, is too simple. All the actors are locked into a system which, because of competition, globalisation, the search for profits and our human enjoyment of tasty, fatty and sugary foods, is hard to change. | Harvey also writes that "food processors raise the price of eating and reduce the standard of nutrition". It would be foolish to say that all processed food is rubbish. But we eat too much even of the better kind, and far too much of the worse kind. The less well off, on tighter budgets and more often seeing food as a form of consolation, suffer most. The idea that this happens because food companies brainwash us into eating like this, that their profits swell as our waistlines expand, is too simple. All the actors are locked into a system which, because of competition, globalisation, the search for profits and our human enjoyment of tasty, fatty and sugary foods, is hard to change. |
| Reformers from Elizabeth David to Jamie Oliver, from the German food movement in the 1820s to the Soil Association in Britain today, have made some inroads, but it is a battle which seemingly never ends. An educated public opinion focusing on what really matters and not on what is secondary, is critical. That is why it must be stressed that the "threat to health" involved in the horseburger affair is little to do with minute amounts of bute, nor with the possibility that once crooks get into the system standards of hygiene may be discarded. There are some risks there, true. But the problem is much more fundamental than that. | Reformers from Elizabeth David to Jamie Oliver, from the German food movement in the 1820s to the Soil Association in Britain today, have made some inroads, but it is a battle which seemingly never ends. An educated public opinion focusing on what really matters and not on what is secondary, is critical. That is why it must be stressed that the "threat to health" involved in the horseburger affair is little to do with minute amounts of bute, nor with the possibility that once crooks get into the system standards of hygiene may be discarded. There are some risks there, true. But the problem is much more fundamental than that. |
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