LONDON/BRUSSELS – First there was “pink slime.” Then horse meat. And most recently, “desinewed meat.”
Recent revelations that such products have reached dinner tables, including horse meat falsely labeled as beef in Europe, have cast an unappetizing light on the global food industry.
Critics say the widening horse-meat scandal in particular is a result of a food-supply chain that has become too complex to be safe. Others say we are stuck with the system — in today’s world, foodstuffs are highly mobile commodities, and consumers have come to expect plentiful, cheap meat.
Genevieve Cazes-Valette, a French anthropologist who studies food, said that throughout history, people around the world have had a special and intense relationship with meat.
“When we fast, we don’t give up bread. We give up meat,” she said. A century ago, meat was a dish primarily for special occasions or the rich. That is still the case in much of the world, but today consumers in wealthy countries expect meat to be their primary source of protein, and they want it inexpensive and convenient. They would also prefer not to think too hard about where it came from.
“They want cheap and they want good,” Cazes-Valette said.
Europe’s horse-meat scandal has exposed a food-supply chain that was set up to fulfill that demand, one in which meat from a Romanian abattoir can end up in British lasagna via companies in Luxembourg and France. Since horse DNA was found in burgers from an Irish plant last month, the scandal has snaked its way across the continent, exposing a haphazard system with seemingly little rhyme or reason.
The scandal is widening at a furious pace. EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg told regional leaders at crisis talks Wednesday that Brussels was calling on all 27 member nations of the European Union to carry out DNA tests on beef products to see if they contain horse meat. Borg said the commission would also urge checks for an equine veterinary drug that can be dangerous to humans — phenylbutazone — in all European establishments handling raw horse meat.
Should the proposals to tighten controls on processed foods be accepted, 4,000 tests for the equine drug and another 2,500 tests for horse meat would be conducted in March, with preliminary results released April 15. Brussels has offered to put up half of the funding, Borg said.
Horse meat is not generally considered unsafe to eat, but the scandal has triggered disgust in places such as Britain, where it traditionally is not eaten, and anger over the mislabeling of food products. Three of the British firms whose products were found to contain horse meat say they got the products from a French food processing firm, Comigel.
Comigel instructed Tavola, its subsidiary in Luxembourg, to make the products. Tavola then placed an order for the meat with supplier Spanghero, based in the south of France, which contacted a Cypriot trader, who subcontracted a Dutch trader.
The Dutch trader placed an order with abattoirs in Romania, which sent the meat to Spanghero. The Romanians deny mislabeling horse meat as beef. Spanghero sent it on to Comigel’s factory in Luxembourg, and it went into food products shipped to stores across Europe.
Apart from the use of horse meat — whose origins remain disputed — there is nothing unusual about the process. But the thought of anything making an unannounced appearance in prepared foods disturbs consumers.
“In France as elsewhere, people have this idea that we don’t know quite what we’re eating. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know who has touched it,” Cazes-Valette said.
That unease stems partly from the fact that people in developed countries have become detached from the origins of the food they eat.
British Conservative Party lawmaker Mark Spencer argued in the House of Commons earlier this week that the horse-meat crisis arose partly because “we have lost context of how valuable food is.”
“You could say the same about car tires,” he said. “You would never buy secondhand cheap car tires from someone on the cheap, because you would instantly recognize that your own individual safety is at risk.”
It is true that in many Western countries, food has rarely been so cheap, and we have never been so dependent on cheap food. In Britain, for instance, food once was one of the major household expenses, but U.K. households now spend less on food than on transport, culture and recreation, housing or fuel.
According to the Office for National Statistics, British households on average spent just over 11 percent of their income on food in 2011, considerably less than a few decades ago. But the global economic crisis has hit incomes. Simultaneously, factors including bad weather and growing demand have caused prices to rise for staples such as wheat, corn and soybeans.
In the austerity-hit countries of Europe, people are buying less food and seeking cheaper food. So there has been a rise in demand for low-cost processed foods, including cheap burgers, pasta meals and pies. Supermarkets, under pressure to offer cheap food, demand suppliers provide products for less. That means bulking out burgers with cheap ingredients.
Some in Britain have blamed the horse-meat fraud on an abrupt European ban on the use of “desinewed meat,” the minced flesh that comes from rubbing animal carcasses that have already been stripped of prime cuts. Desinewed meat played a major role in British meat products, but since last year’s ban, suppliers have had to find a replacement.
And that, some believe, is where horse meat came into the picture.
Elizabeth Dowler, professor of food and social policy at the University of Warwick, noted the root of the problem is that food has become a vast international industry whose main concern is the bottom line, saying: “Food is treated as a commodity. It is not seen as something that contributes to well-being.”
European fears about horse meat echo those that swept across the United States last year when the use of a meat product dubbed “pink slime” became widely known. Like desinewed meat or horse flesh, it was never alleged that pink slime was unfit for human consumption, but the thought of fatty bits of beef being treated with a puff of ammonia to kill bacteria was something of a turnoff for Americans.
The reaction to pink slime was drastic. Fast-food companies, including McDonald’s, changed their menus. Grocery stores promised to stop selling it. All but three states opted against buying meat with the product for school meals. And the meat processors that churned out the product began closing plants and laying off employees.
Cazes-Valette predicted a similar reaction in Europe. “People will go back to buying pure beef that they’re going to prepare themselves,” she said. “Maybe they’re even going to go back to the butcher, where they know what’s going on.”
And, she added, rather than pay more, “they’re going to eat less.”
But Michael Walker, a science and food law consultant to British food-testing and analysis company LGC, said it will be hard for people to break their dependence on a complex food-supply chain, especially if they want year-round availability of a wide range of products.
Walker said the horse-meat scandal shows the system of testing and regulation is fallible, but not fundamentally broken.
Walker said the science of DNA testing that exposes adulterated meat is robust, but that regulators, many of whom are facing government budget cuts, needed to use more “intelligence-led sampling” to catch offenders.
“The ingenuity of fraudsters is almost infinite, but we must do our best to try and keep up,” he said.
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