Horsemeat Horror

The story's been running a while now.  First traces of horse DNA were found in burgers at a number of stores.  Why Tesco was so singled out in all the reports I'm not sure, given they were also stocked in Iceland, Lidl and Aldi.  It was almost as if they were the only ones who sold them.  Perhaps everyone just hates Tesco for a number of reasons including workfare and killing the British high street.  The latter is of course true, but only because everyone shops there.

In any case, yesterday we discovered that Swedish ready meal company Findus "beef" lasagne products were found to contain up to 100% horse meat.  Cue loads of fabulously awful horse jokes on Twitter, but also real concern and upset about the whole issue.

A Trakehner: magnificent East Prussian warm-blood

Trust and Labelling

Mainly, the upset is expressed as anger at having been misled.  We cannot trust food labelling and there are questions about whether processed food manufacturers even know themselves what is in their products.  This is, of course, absolutely valid.

It has shone a spotlight on the fact that when you're buying a beefburger, it doesn't contain the meat from an individual animal, slaughtered, and made into a nice patty.  Instead it is full of bits and pieces of different animals (and clearly different types of animals), processed beyond recognition.  Look at this passage from the Guardian.  That's what's legally going in your beefburgers and sausages, ladies and gentlemen, labelled as "seasoning".

If the outcome of all of this is an increased understanding that if you want the meat from a single animal in your beefburger, you need to buy mince from your local butcher and make it yourself, great.   I'm a little surprised that people are surprised, though.

Corned Beef - or Corned Dog - British Army staple

Apparently Bismarck, well over 100 years ago, said "Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made."  We always used to call the German Bratwurst sausages "Schlechteaugenwürste" (roughly: "rotten eye sausages") 25 years ago.   My Dad referred to corned beef as "corned dog" from his Army days.  These are obviously jokes, but we knew that the notion came from somewhere.  People surely don't think that supermarket sausages are 100% meat?  They're packed full of all kinds of stuff, and the actual meat (as low as 47% of the content in so-called value burgers) which is in there... well.

Here's Giles Coren, who is absolutely correct in my opinion:

Health Concerns

Let's also be clear, the Food Standards Agency has said there is no health risk involved with the horse meat.  How they know that so quickly is anyone's guess, but they're scientists and I'm not.  However, they have said this so far.   I can understand people being outraged if something is labelled "nut free" when it's not, or "vegetarian" when it's not, or "kosher" when it's not.  There are actual health, ethical and religious concerns involved.  Here this huge issue is apparently because a different animal has found its way into an animal product.

The trail seems to lead to Polish suppliers.  They may or may not have slaughtered horses in accordance with EU standards (horse meat, is of course, eaten across the continent).  Equally beef supplies from Poland may or may not have been subject to the same level of health standards, but people aren't horribly alarmed by the chance they're not.  Tesco Value Chicken is imported from Thailand: aren't people worried by the potential of poor standards there?  I've no more reason to trust them than to trust that an EU abattoir in Poland did not slaughter these horses in the correct manner.

The Horse in the Room

No, my impression is that it's specifically the horse element that seems to have upset most people, whether they express it or not.  If these were (non-halal/kosher) beef burgers that were found to have contained 60% or even 100% pork, would everyone really be so agitated?  You can of course claim that you want to know what's in your food, and you'd be correct.  I'm just questioning whether every newspaper would be full of this right now.

"Fine Horse Meat: to barbecue" (Switzerland)

Remarkably few people I've seen have mentioned "the horse in the room" and that they're actually disgusted at the idea of eating them.  A few have, and it's very honest.  It also still strikes me as odd, though.  Of course you're entitled to eat whatever you wish, but why the distinction?  Pigs are more intelligent than dogs.  I'd say a lamb, or a calf, is far cuter personally.  Of course horses have been domesticated to a large extent, so humanity has a kind of bond with them.  I do wonder how many of us (outside Surrey) have close relationships to a particular one that we know though.  I can get the idea of eating a dog or a cat because so many of us have them as pets... but horses?

I've been told that it's not in our culture to eat horses: it's an animal that we once worshipped.  Well we certainly don't worship them now and does anyone really believe that as an argument?  Ancient people worshipped all sorts of random things, including circles of stones, but things move on.  It's also the case that the ancient Gauls worshipped horses, but are happy enough to eat them in France today.

Horse Steak

In Dutch the horse is considered a "noble creature".  I remember from my Dutch classes that it even has a special linguistic status. A horse for example has a "hoofd", which is a word for head usually reserved for humans.  Cows, dogs, cats, hamsters and pigs make do with a "kop".  Still, the Dutch eat them, hoofd an' all.

Lots of People Eat Horses

In fact, LOTS of people eat horses.  According to Wikipedia, 4.7 million horses are eaten a year in the world.  They are a delicacy in France, Germany and Scandinavia and are often sold in upmarket "boutique" horse butchers.  According to my Oslo Twitter friend @Lise_79, in Norway, when food is labeled 'dyrekjøtt' (cattle, or 'large farm animal'), it can mean beef and/or horse.

I found a whole range of horse recipes this morning on German websites.  My favourite was "Pferdefleischwurstsalat" (Horse Meat Sausage Salad) - but mainly because I love the length and construction of German words.  Here's a link to a lovely old Horse Butcher's shop in wealthy, civilised Dortmund.  Note the picture: yes it's BLACK BEAUTY.  The site is actually labelled "Thoroughbred Horse Slaughter Place" if you translate it literally.  My impression is that the Germans are much less squeamish and a lot more honest than Brits, at least nowadays, in this regard.

Perhaps the biggest surprise?  Horses were eaten in the UK until the 1930s, apparently particularly in Yorkshire.  This wasn't a War shortage thing, and it somewhat undermines the "we worshipped them 2000 years ago" explanation for why eating them is so abhorrent to the British. 

Picture c/o @MrStevenMoore

Disassociation

I've my own theory on all of this, and I'm sure it's not one that's going to win me too many friends.  It's one I think plenty of vegetarians will however identity with.  It simply comes down to this: many people really don't like associating any real life animal with what they're eating on the plate.  There is a deep seated ability to make absolutely no link between the cute little lambs you'll see this month bouncing round fields, with the meat you eat on Sunday.  Your sausages aren't the ones that were in any way associated with the brutal sow stalls and stomach turning cruelty of the factory farming industry... etc, etc.  We've got that sorted in our heads with regards to cows, pigs and sheep.  We don't have it sorted when it comes to horses.  This is new, and it's challenging.

What this scandal has done is throw up perfectly valid concerns about labelling, provenance, the way in which the ready-food industry operates.  However, beyond that, it has made a very concrete link in lots of people's minds back to actual animals that they eat.  Many people just don't, as a rule, like to think eating what was once a living, breathing being, about where they've come from, or about supporting an industry that many would find sickening beyond belief, if they ever dared to explore it.

Put bluntly, many people are in denial about eating meat in general, and this is reflected in their reactions to this horse meat story.  My friend @TheMrsFong puts it perfectly here, and in her typically gentle and thoughtful way.  Read from the bottom tweet up:

Shergar Steaks, Anyone? 

There we go.  You may be one of the meat-eaters who is not put off by horse meat, and I have a lot of respect for your position.  It has an intellectual honesty about it.  If you eat cow or pig, why not?  By all accounts it tastes extremely good.

For my part, I can't really see any other explanation, for the reasons set out above, why it is such a massive story that horse meat has been found in processed food.  We know processed food is dodgy, we know there's no confirmed health risk, and we know that we don't actually worship horses.  We also know that the newspapers wouldn't be full of these stories, if it had been pork, rather than horse, that was found in a product labelled "beef lasagne".

This story has unsettled many people and filled them with revulsion.  I genuinely think many won't consciously realise why.  If they eat meat anyway, I just cannot see why they are so upset, other than it has made them think for a moment about the meat industry in general.  I'm just guessing plenty have found they don't actually like thinking about that much at all.

Veggiephobia

Something odd happened last night. Having no friends and having run out of conversation with the collie, I decided to blog.  I wanted to write about why I was vegetarian.  I got four paragraphs in and ground to a halt.  I've never not been able to blog before.  What stopped me? Veggiephobia!

VEGGIEPHOBIA (n): 1) Irrational fear of vegetarians; 2) State of being a total arse when in the company of those decide not to eat meat.  Manifests itself in the churning out of a series of clichéd jokes or passive aggression and usually culminates in an observation such as "Ah but you wear leather shoes!"; 3) Longstanding provocation defence in English common law. Reduces a murder charge to manslaughter when the vegetarian clobbers the meat-eater to death in complete exasperation (R v Vegetarian Society [1974 AC 217[1]).

What on earth am I talking about?  I just knew that if I blogged about why I'm vegetarian, I would get a whole set of snide, defensive and frankly really quite unfunny responses. When I tweeted that observation it led to a flurry of exchanges.  Most meat eaters seemed amazed and genuinely didn't have any idea this type of thing existed.  A series of resigned tweets from vegetarians led me to think I was far from alone.   

 I think Matthijs puts it pretty well.  He is 26. Early retirement indeed.

A Personal Choice

Being vegetarian is an intensely personal choice.  People have a whole series of reasons for it and it covers a whole range of choices about what you eat.  You can have "vegetarians" who eat fish (technically they're pescetarians) through to vegans who don't eat any animal products at all.  Most people are like me: lacto-ovo-vegetarians.  The way I explain it is "if it had a face, then no thanks".  We eat eggs, cheese, drink milk but don't eat a dead creature's flesh.

Some people are part time vegetarians, frequently choosing the non-meat option when they eat out in restaurants.  It doesn't have to be a black and white choice.  Many people were vegetarian for at least some time in their lives and then for whatever reason go back to eating meat, or perhaps just fish and fowl.

Some Examples

So what is the fuss about?  I can't imagine hostility and jokes about a decision not to eat ice-cream for example.  Yet hostility there is, without question.  I've been veggie since I was 25 (I'm now 40) and the range of negative reactions range from the patronising through to quite unpleasant outright taunting.  Here are a few I've encountered:

• "If we weren't supposed to eat them, why are animals made out of meat?" 
• "Carrots scream when they're pulled out of the ground you know"
• "It's not natural to be vegetarian" (yup, just like antibiotics and central heating. We should all in fact live in caves and die at 30)
• "If we didn't eat cows they'd be extinct" (erm yeah, just like giraffes, for example)
• "But bacon tastes soooooo good" (ideally accompanied by picking up a piece of it on your fork and dangling it in front of the vegetarian's nose)
• "Any vegetarian who eats eggs is SO hypocritical" (having pronounced this you can smugly go back to eating your lump of steak)
• "Wasn't Hitler vegetarian? Haha - but look at what he did to the Jews... " (no he wasn't: his favourite food was sausage. He suffered from stomach cramps and so ate heavily, but not exclusively vegetarian meals) 
• "Oh I could never give up [insert: bacon, Big Mac etc.]" Fascinating. Ever thought I MIGHT NOT CARE WHAT YOU LIKE TO EAT? Are you interested to know I don't like grapefruit? And also is not giving up the odd bacon sandwich *really* your reason for you to continue eating lamb, beef, pork etc up to 3 times a day?
• "How ridiculous you eat meat substitutes - I just don't get that" (for many it's an ethical not a taste decision.  The thought of Wienerschnitzel makes me whimper and salivate.  If I can find a tasty meat substitute I will eat and enjoy it: mung beans and tofu are not everyone's idea of fun)
• And our absolute and utterly original favourite: "Ahhh, but you wear leather shoes/ belt" followed by raised eyebrows.  This is where the provocation defence mentioned in the definition above kicks in.

My best friend was once told at a dinner party by a Tory MP "Suffolk may accept your homosexuality, but it will never accept your vegetarianism".  Cue guffaws from all the guests.  Hmm, hysterical.

An interesting observation is that most of the negativity (dressed up frequently as "humour") comes from men.  Many women say "Oh I could quite easily be a vegetarian".  A good few men seem to retreat to some weird caveman position that unless you're shoving bleeding bison down your gullet, you're a huge poof.  It genuinely seems to threaten the masculinity of a few guys.  I find this utterly bizarre.

Back to the "jokes"... guess what - you're never going to come out with an original or amusing quip to a vegetarian - we've heard it all.  Many, many, many times before.  This is a large part of why we don't find it funny.  When a joke is heard the 80th time, it's just not amusing.  It's not to do with a lack of sense of humour.  I also bet if you've made comments like this, you don't see it as being hostile, passive-aggressive or just plain boring at all.  For the most part, we do, though.

Evangelical, dull, worthy vegetarians

I don't seek to impose my dietary choices on anyone.  If you want to eat meat in front of me, you're welcome to.  If we're out on a date and I'm paying, I'll pay for your meal whatever you order.  What I won't do, personally, is cook meat for you in my house.  I know plenty of veggies who would though.  They just choose not to eat it themselves.  I'm not evangelical and have a "live and let live attitude".   I think most of us do: as I said, this is an intensely personal decision. 

Ahhh you say - but what about all those evangelical, worthy vegetarians?  Why do they have ram their views down our throat and get all superior?  I'm sure these people exist.  I literally can't say I've ever met one though.  What I think is much more likely to be the case is that there is a big dollop of projection going on here from the meat-eater and it's linked to an inherent unease that some have about their diets.

Some might call this guilt.  All I can speak about is myself; and before I became veggie it definitely was guilt for me.  I could only eat meat if I didn't associate the cute brown eyed animal in the field with what was served up on my plate.  I certainly didn't want to think about the process in the middle (or indeed the millions of animals that never see the light of day or a field at all).

Paul McCartney is right: I didn't inform myself and just wouldn't "go there" even in my own head.  I therefore was naturally quite defensive in respect of anyone who had thought about this a bit more and made the decision to be veggie.

Now here's something interesting about evangelical, worthy veggies: Fiona Laird whose tweet appears above, is a friend of mine in real life.  We've had dinner together in restaurants.  I'd never even registered she was vegetarian until our discussion last night.  She's not running around making a big fuss about it, forcing her views down people's throats.  I didn't even know - and why should I, as I've never cooked for her?  Many other people whom I follow tweeted me and are veggie, unbeknown to me.

So why are people veggie?

The range of reasons is huge.  For me I looked down at a ham sandwich and a cheese sandwich on 20 August 1996.  I simply realised I'd never made the decision to eat meat: I'd done it since a kid without thinking about it because my parents gave it to me.  When I did think about it, it repulsed me.  Not the taste of the stuff: but what it actually is.  I know the intelligence and amazing range of emotions my dog has.  I wouldn't eat @LassieOscar, so why eat any other animal?  It just seemed unnecessary for me to choose the ham when I could have the cheese.  I can nourish myself perfectly well without meat.

For other people it's about the environment.  I can dish out the numbers: one tonne of beef production takes up 45 tonnes of crop production that could be used to feed the world.  The millions of cows we breed to eat let out methane, which is 25 times more damaging to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide.  Visit Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia and the desert for miles around under Aboriginal control is beautiful and full of flowers and wild life.  Get back to cattle producing Australia and the land is red dust.  One single cow guzzles over 70 gallons of water every week.  A herd of 1000 is a disaster for the environment.  When we ate meat once or twice a week it was better.  Now as people demand meat up to three times a day, and countries with heavily vegetarian diets move to "Western" diets (e.g. China) it is massively and frighteningly unsustainable.

My best friend has been veggie for 25 years.  He does not believe it is morally wrong to kill animals; he simply fundamentally objects to the industrialised factory nature of farming today.  There are meat eaters like him of course: they eat little carefully sourced organic free range food (at least that's what they buy for eating at home; what's served up in restaurants is mainly out of their control).  My position is that I believe killing is inherently wrong: again, this is a very personal viewpoint and you (and he) don't have to agree with it.  A couple of total dimwits from the past have however taken a similar position...

The point is there are masses of reasons for any decision we make: for vegetarians it can be sentimental, ethical, pragmatic, taste, health or environmental factors.... or a combination of some or all of them that lead them to eat what they do.  Why people have to be so snarky about this decision, I really don't get - other than coming back to the fact that it's because of an inherent unease they have about what they themselves are eating.

What ABOUT wearing leather?!

Live and let live.  For me that means respecting that if you want to eat meat and enjoy it, fine.  But drop your silly comments, please, and leave me to eat what I wish to, without making me feel like a pariah when you invite me over to dinner.  Please don't ask me to justify or explain myself.  I don't ask you to justify why you eat meat.

If you do push and push me, and I end up pointing out that what you are putting in your mouth is the antibiotic laden corpse of a tortured animal, you're not going to take it too kindly, are you?  No, even though you brought the subject up, I'll just be one of those evangelical, dull, worthy vegetarians...

As for (many) egg and (especially) dairy products, yes - you're quite right.  Only a vegan can take the moral high ground in this area.  Most vegans I know are quiet, thoughtful, gentle souls - they actually don't get all aggressive and moralistic, funny enough.  I respect and admire them, and I know the huge problems they have in eating, other than in their own homes.  The same point about the moral ground goes for wearing leather: I've tried plastic shoes: they don't work for me and it's a compromise I have made to wear leather shoes that clearly cannot be justified if I'm consistent.

There is however the rather obvious question of degree.  If someone drives their car at 34 mph once a year in a 30mph speed limit, this is not great.  I think most people would agree, though, that there's a qualitative difference between that and someone who speeds at 70mph every time they drive through the village.  Yes, better that no one speeds: but don't pretend we are the same qualitatively.  We are not.  I've apparently saved the lives of around 1500 animals in the time I've been veggie.  If I reach 80, then 5500 animals will not have died because of my dietary choices.  Yes, my shoes are leather and an animal died to produce them.  However, I'm undeniably doing my bit, however imperfect.

Ending Thoughts

If reading this has brought up issues that make you uncomfortable, sorry.  If you're making a conscious informed choice to eat meat, enjoy it.  If you're doing it blindly (as I was) though there is no inevitability about your continued choice.  I'm not a black/white person: if you do feel uncomfortable, just cut down.  Try some veggie substitutes.  You can make a huge difference to animal suffering, the environment or your own health just by eating less meat rather than stopping it entirely.

There was genuine amazement last night when I tweeted about hostility to veggies.  Some of it came from people who themselves had made comments such as "yummmm bacon!" to me in the past.  I guess you're just not aware of it.  We are and I'd ask you please have a bit of sensitivity about this.  If someone has made a personal decision actively not to eat meat (which is not the default setting in this country) they've done it for a reason.  Taunting them, no matter how amusing you find it, really isn't that big or clever.

Over and out: it's time for a quorn sausage!

 

UPDATE: Was sent this by commentator "Forty Shades of Grey" below - Priceless :-)