Saturday 23 February 2013

'Nag' food producers

The horsemeat scandal continues and now Germany's development minister has asked for the products that have been affected to be distributed to the poor. There is nothing wrong with that if food producers are taking their food off the shelves and there are no health implications to eating the food. If these products are being destroyed simply because they need relabelling then we need to do a lot of 'nagging'.  It is simply not right to destroy good food. The question is whether it is good.

If I were buying a beef product and horse was given to me then something is fundamentally wrong and trust with the producer has been lost. If the label can't tell you the type of meat you are buying then can you trust the food to be fit for human consumption? If the answer is no then the matter is much more serious than has been previously suggested. If there are no health implications then how can we allow good food to be destroyed?

There are people who think that eating horsemeat is taboo even in the form of a beefburger, where you can't tell what you are eating. Allowing people to unknowingly eat horse is a scandal in its own right. I can see how this may upset some people even though there is no fundamental difference with eating lamb or any other animal. I am going to France in the next few weeks and look forward to tasting horse steak. I'll let you know what it tastes like even though it is fairly obvious that when you put some in a burger it tastes like beef. The underlying scandal is the destruction of good food.

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