Horse on the menu? Great!

11 February, 2013 (12:19) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I’m surprised people weren’t pleased to discover that some processed ready meals contained horse.

Rightly or wrongly, I have always thought cheap supermarket ready meals contain the scrapings of any old sinew, bone and fat off the abbatoir floor all glued together with badgers’ vomit. The fact that a meal contained meat from a single named animal means the product was a damned sight classier than I ever imagined.

What does anybody expect from cheap food? Tell me, what do you think is the most important thing to the producer of a cheap supermarket ready meal:

1: The welfare of the animals the meal may or may not contain…

2: You, the customer…

Or 3: The amount of profit to be squeezed from each plastic tray.

3? Thought so. So answer me this: what do you think the producers of such processed food will do to turn a profit:

1: Anything they can so long as the quality of the food is not compromised…

2: Anything they can so long as animal welfare is not compromised…

3: Absolutely anything they can.

Another 3? Hmmm.

You may or may not like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, but I am signed up to  his central mantra: if you’re going to eat something you owe it to yourself and your dinner to know where it came from and that it was treated with respect. How else can you even begin to justify eating another living creature?

Of course not everybody can afford to get in the 4×4 and nip down to the local organic butcher while catching up with The Archers on Radio 4… and of course making stuff cheap means its contents are not sourced from a pedigree Aberdeen Angus which spent its long, happy life being hand-fed lush highland grass by its caring owner while being massaged with essential oils by Hamish the cowman. That, though, doesn’t mean people who don’t have the money to eat nothing but the best should be abandoned to the tender mercies of a few Romanian horse traders.

It’s not just money, either: for many consumers of ready-made meals it is simply not possible to cook. My dad, for example, is, at 83, beyond chopping and dicing, sealing and searing, grinding and basting. It’s all too damned hard with arthritic fingers. So he shops for ready meals – fortunately, he can buy the best but who’s to say Dobbin hasn’t been included in the list of ingredients there too?

It comes down to education and expectation: ready meals need traceable ingredients, just like the best restaurant menus. If that means they’re more expensive, then pensions and benefits must not be cut. To make the money we’re saving we could, for example, reverse the cuts in the upper rate of tax.

And how about spending more money on education – creating decent menus for not much, putting together ready re-heatable meals that don’t have to contain meat? If you have to have meat, well, here’s a menu for the week: one bag of minced beef, organic and tracebale. An onion. Some mushrooms. Carrot and celery if you like. A tin of chopped tomatoes. Garlic. Basil, oregano and pepper. Whack it all together and you have a family sized pot of Bolognese for at least three days. Substitute red beans for mushrooms, carrot and celery and chilis for basil and oregano and it’s chili time – with rice, with  tortillas, with pitta bread, with salad. Not too difficult. And if I can do that at home, a ready meal creator can do it in a factory, surely.

There are ways, there are always ways. Only one thing is certain: if you leave anything, anything at all, to the unregulated mercies of the free market, manufacturers will find ways to reduce costs, manufacturers will put profit before quality, and consumers – and animals – will suffer.

And finally

I’ve watched the Chris Huhne trial with interest, and imagined how far I would have got with the statement: “Darling, please will you take three penalty points on your driving licence for me?” That’s all I’m saying.

There is a very strange phenomenon this morning: sunshine. So I’m going outside now.

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