Customer to the Butcher: A pound of mince, please
Butcher to the Customer: Aye, neigh bother.
Who is responsible for the horsemeat scandal? "Not us’ say the government (even though they cut the number of food inspectors). ‘Nor us’, say the supermarket bosses. "Us neither" say the suppliers. "It wasn't us" say the abattoirs. As in every good ‘Whodunnit’ drama, we are looking for a bad guy. The French and then the Romanians were first to be blamed, now it is organised crime and the Mafia. The Swedes blamed the French company Spanghero who also deny the charge. The Netherlands said the Cyprus-based meat vendor Draap that sold the meat to Spanghold was responsible, and the company’s track record would suggest the Dutch had a point. In 2012 Draap was convicted of selling South American horsemeat labeled at German and Dutch beef. Draap — run by a trust in the British Virgin Islands — is owned by the company Guardstand, that in turn owns part of the arms dealing company, Ilex Ventures. According to prosecutors in New York, convicted international arms dealer Viktor Bout owns Ilex Ventures. Guardstand’s sole shareholderis Trident Trust, which sets up companies in tax-free nations. Guardstand helped set up Ilex.
A kilo of horsemeat costs $0.66 cents, a kilo of beef, $3.95. We have all been unwitting victims of money-fuelled profit policies where the whole food industry and its regulators have been complicit in cheating workers by substituting nutricious healthy safe food for chemicalised processed convenience food. Processed food products is a business with traditionally low margins that often leads producers to hunt for the cheapest suppliers and often contain ingredients from multiple suppliers in different countries, who themselves at time subcontract production to others, making it hard to monitor every link in the production chain.
“Why was horsemeat present in beef burgers?” asks Elizabeth Dowler, a professor of food and social policy at Warwick University, “Because the price has to be kept as low as possible.” Horsemeat is one-fifth the price of beef, so the temptation is to either adulterate beef with horse, or sell it as cheap beef. “This has the most impact on those with low income and large numbers of children,” says Dowler. “People in this situation have no money to buy better quality burgers, or to go to a butcher and make their own mincemeat. Instead they depend on special 3-for-2 offers. The problem is linked to poverty.”
Dirk Niebel Germany's development minister has suggested that horsemeat mislabelled as beef should be distributed to the poor. Prelate Bernhard Felmberg, the senior representative of the Evangelical Church in Germany, has backed the proposal saying "to throw away food that could be consumed without risk is equally bad as false labelling and cannot be a solution."
Butcher to the Customer: Aye, neigh bother.
Who is responsible for the horsemeat scandal? "Not us’ say the government (even though they cut the number of food inspectors). ‘Nor us’, say the supermarket bosses. "Us neither" say the suppliers. "It wasn't us" say the abattoirs. As in every good ‘Whodunnit’ drama, we are looking for a bad guy. The French and then the Romanians were first to be blamed, now it is organised crime and the Mafia. The Swedes blamed the French company Spanghero who also deny the charge. The Netherlands said the Cyprus-based meat vendor Draap that sold the meat to Spanghold was responsible, and the company’s track record would suggest the Dutch had a point. In 2012 Draap was convicted of selling South American horsemeat labeled at German and Dutch beef. Draap — run by a trust in the British Virgin Islands — is owned by the company Guardstand, that in turn owns part of the arms dealing company, Ilex Ventures. According to prosecutors in New York, convicted international arms dealer Viktor Bout owns Ilex Ventures. Guardstand’s sole shareholderis Trident Trust, which sets up companies in tax-free nations. Guardstand helped set up Ilex.
A kilo of horsemeat costs $0.66 cents, a kilo of beef, $3.95. We have all been unwitting victims of money-fuelled profit policies where the whole food industry and its regulators have been complicit in cheating workers by substituting nutricious healthy safe food for chemicalised processed convenience food. Processed food products is a business with traditionally low margins that often leads producers to hunt for the cheapest suppliers and often contain ingredients from multiple suppliers in different countries, who themselves at time subcontract production to others, making it hard to monitor every link in the production chain.
“Why was horsemeat present in beef burgers?” asks Elizabeth Dowler, a professor of food and social policy at Warwick University, “Because the price has to be kept as low as possible.” Horsemeat is one-fifth the price of beef, so the temptation is to either adulterate beef with horse, or sell it as cheap beef. “This has the most impact on those with low income and large numbers of children,” says Dowler. “People in this situation have no money to buy better quality burgers, or to go to a butcher and make their own mincemeat. Instead they depend on special 3-for-2 offers. The problem is linked to poverty.”
Dirk Niebel Germany's development minister has suggested that horsemeat mislabelled as beef should be distributed to the poor. Prelate Bernhard Felmberg, the senior representative of the Evangelical Church in Germany, has backed the proposal saying "to throw away food that could be consumed without risk is equally bad as false labelling and cannot be a solution."
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