Recipes for disaster

The extent of how our food is adulterated widens with Findus lasagna containing mostly horsemeat. Workers often don’t have time to prepare meals and so they eat mass produced “convenience” foods. If you are working class you spend your time looking for the cheapest bargains and eating the least healthy food just to make ends meet.


Horsemeat in the UK is legal but you have to list it as an ingredient on the label. It is also probable that horsemeat has been on sale in many meat products for years in the UK. As the incomes of the working class have been cut “economy” foods have become staples for many families. A “standard” beefburger can only be classified as such if it comprises a minimum of 47% beef and this "meat" often means 32 percent fat, 19 percent connective tissue, and 3 percent collagen. This leaves much scope for the burgers to be “filled” out with other ingredients. Hides or gristle of animals described as “seasoning” mix can be added. For those who seek profit at any expense it made sense to bulk out material with cheaper substance.

Is it no wonder that supermarket profits have been booming in recent yers. It's been from a policy of maximising profits at the expense of both their suppliers and their customers. The purchasing power of supermarket chains is such that it has forced margins down at many food suppliers. Price discounting by the large supermarkets has been passed on to suppliers. The price-reduced  “loss leaders” by the supermarkets are generally fatty and sugary processed foods, which are high in calories, and thus satisfy hunger, but are nutritionally poor. These problems are further amplified by the scope of the industrial-scale food system. Now, a single food contamination problem at a single national processing facility, be it meat, eggs (remember the salmonella scare?) or whatever, can virtually infect the entire country and world through their national and international distribution model. Agriculture and livestock production is governed by the same pressure and methods that dominate other industries like the car industry.

The Food Standards Agency was set up in 2000  following numerous public health crises and epidemics: salmonella, listeria, botulism, BSE (“mad cow” disease) and the outbreak of E.coli food poisoning. A new food agency untarnished by past scandals was required. In 2010, as part of the governments' deregulation programme, the FSA was stripped of sole responsibility for food composition and safety. It's powers over food labelling and composition responsibility were instead given to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In the UK, trading standards officers are responsible for food inspections, but its budget been cut from £213 million in 2011-12 to £140 million by 2014 will be hazardous to public safety. In just the two years between 2009-10 and 2011-12, 743 jobs were lost in trading standards at local authority level.

Profit-greedy companies have always produced low quality food. Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England describes it was common for butcher’s shops to sell tainted meats because of “the incomprehensibly small fines” to which they were subject when caught.  Pounded rice and other cheap materials are mixed in sugar, and sold at full price. Chicory is mixed in good coffee, cocoa is extensively adulterated with fine brown earth, wrought up with mutton fat, so as to amalgamate with portions of the real article. Tea leaves are also redried, and recoloured on hot copper plates, and sold as tea. Marx in Capital relates how bread contained "cobwebs, dead cockroaches and putrid German yeast, not to mention alum, sand and other agreeable mineral ingredients.”

In the aftermath of the Mid Staffordshire scandal in which up to 1,200 patients are thought to have died unnecessarily, in conditions of thirst, hunger, filth, isolation and misery which almost defy description. Following the fraud and deceit of the banking industry. Now the adulteration of our foods. Yet still - no prosecutions of the guilty!

But when are we going to recognise the guilt of the system that spawned such scandals? Many may well be angered and disillusioned but business self-interest is being put ahead of peoples' welfare repeatedly in all spheres of our lives. We have to build a new society where our well-being comes first and foremost. Food production is now a global industry that is controlled by a handful of companies and food contamination is a constant threat to the health of millions of people. While many in the "good food movement" have voiced strong concerns about conditions yet legislation goes back centuries but the agri-business and food industry carry on regardless with their pursuit of profit. Tens of thousands of people every year suffer serious food poisoning. But our food also contains a number of substances which, whilst not leading to food poisoning, may, in the long term, be as damaging to our health if not more so.

 The adulteration of food is not an aberration but is a natural consequence of having capitalism. The whole production of food - from the farm (pharming as some call it these days) to the processing plant, to the supermarket, and to the consumer is dictated not by the needs of those who eat it but by the hunger for profit.  Food production is a political issue. We now have the ability to feed all the world many times over using advances in agricultural techniques, in the use of pesticides, fertilisers, irrigation and machinery which allows just a small percentage of the population to feed the vast majority. The capitalist system has failed miserably to satisfy one of the most basic human needs, keeping us healthy with sustenance.