Horsemeat in the food chain: seriously, why the long face?

In my day job, I have done virtually nothing else for a full month now apart from answering questions about horsemeat.

Those who have knowingly eaten it assure me that horsemeat is delicious but, like most English people, I always pass those boucheries chevalines in Paris with a shudder of distaste. Which is entirely illogical, given that I don’t even like horses.

Many other columnists have lined up to opine that we are in the midst of a huge crisis caused by our addiction to cheap food, fostered by those evil supermarkets who are constantly driving down standards and screwing their suppliers. The answer, clearly, is to pay more, eat better and support your friendly, local butcher and farmer.

Even though the roof is kept over my head by Britain’s leading high street retailer of frozen food, I am personally delighted that good independent butchers have enjoyed a boost to their trade as a result of all this nonsense.

But please be assured that it is 99.99% nonsense, and that the problem is not so much processed food as manufactured hysteria. Yes, a small handful of rogues have evidently been passing off horsemeat as beef to some unsuspecting customers. But, as the food safety specialists never tire of explaining, this won’t actually do you any harm.

But what, scream the hysterics, if the horses had been treated with the veterinary painkiller called bute? Yes, the Government’s chief medical officer wearily explained, that might indeed stand an outside chance of making you ill if you ate 500 or 600 bute-laced horse burgers every day. Not that any trace of bute has been found in any UK products tested to date.

My client – Iceland Foods, since you ask – withdrew and destroyed a couple of batches of their burgers after the Food Safety Authority in Ireland detected small traces of horse DNA, amounting to one tenth of one per cent of the product. That particular test was not accredited for use in the UK and samples from the same batches were immediately sent to two independent laboratories for confirmation. No trace of horse DNA could be found.

All Iceland’s other beef products have now been tested and similarly proved to contain no rogue horse or pig meat. So they said so. Cue howls of protest that the company is not grovelling apologetically for something it has not done.

It’s a rum food crisis in which no one has died or, so far as we know, even been made ever so slightly poorly. As catastrophes go, it’s the equivalent of the Titanic’s head chef running out of lemon juice for the mousseline sauce to accompany the poached salmon in the first class dining room.

Meanwhile a Titanic-sized death toll has been exacted by mismanagement of the NHS in mid-Staffordshire and yet that, bizarrely, is the story that has proved pretty much a one day wonder.

I am old enough to remember what food shopping was like before the big supermarkets became dominant and the important truth is that it was rubbish.

There has been a revolution in the variety, quality, freshness and value for money of the food available to us in my lifetime that has been driven by supermarkets and is hugely advantageous to us all.

Yes, I also buy from independent shops and farmers’ markets because I am lucky enough to be able to afford to do so, but I have no hesitation in doing the bulk of my shopping in supermarkets – including Iceland – and nor should anyone else.

If you’re going to get hung up on microscopic quantities of DNA, brace yourself for next week’s shock disclosure that your raspberry yogurt almost certainly contains a trace of banana.

Please also remember that your local butcher’s handmade burgers stand every chance of containing minuscule traces of other animals’ DNA. And, unless he washes his hands with the obsessive dedication of a serial killer who has successfully evaded justice, quite possibly human DNA too.

I really hope that some enterprising tabloid does run a test for that, so that we may look forward to the next stage of the crisis: Britain rocked by revelations of rampant cannibalism among the middle classes.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Red mist mars the spring sunshine

When my wife and I got married early in 2009, the vicar presented us with an outsize candle and advised us to light it every time we had a row.

Most observers bet that it would not last until Easter, but in fact it has not been lit once. And now it never will be, because someone foolishly stuck it on a windowsill, where the recent heatwave has melted it into a grotesque lump.

It definitely reminds me of something ... the more than faintly obscene remains of our row candle after someone (who shall remain nameless, but we all know who it is) left it standing in the sun

A taste of the somewhat unconventional ceremony where the candle was handed over

I eagerly awaited my wife’s return from her “hen weekend” so that we could discuss this, in line with the strict blame culture applied in the Hann household. But luckily we still failed to have a row, even when my hopes of a goodly supply of eggs were cruelly dashed. Wrong sort of “hen weekend”, apparently.


It says much for Mrs Hann’s saintly nature that we manage to live so peaceably when I am in a permanent state of badly suppressed fury. On Friday I was angry because I spent five ghastly hours driving to a dinner where no one wanted to speak to me.

While on Thursday, the red mist rose because I had exactly the opposite experience of not being ignored while simply trying to pick up a prescription from my local pharmacy.

To my amazement, I was ushered into a consulting room with the pharmacist and invited to take a seat to discuss my medication. I demurred, being on a tight schedule for lunch in Newcastle, but naturally asked what it was all about.

And the answer was that “rather than simply handing the drugs over, we now like to make sure that our customers know why they have been prescribed them and how to take them.”

I wondered whether I looked like a man who would not know the difference between a pill and a suppository. My doctor prescribed the tablets, so why would I want supplementary advice from a pharmacist? Is this a ploy to fill the 95% of their time that must have been saved by medics prescribing by computer, rather than in an illegible scrawl?

And where will this sort of thing end? Will I be called into a consulting room with my butcher so that he can tell me how the pig felt about being made into sausages, what they are likely to do to my arteries, and how best to cook them?

If the practice spreads to off-licences, I will need to write off half a day every time I want to buy a bottle of Scotch.

So I fixed the chemist with one of my withering looks, informed him that I could read, and flounced off.

It served me right when I got home and read the thousand-word leaflet with the heart medication three times without being able to fathom whether I was supposed to take it in the morning or evening, and with or without food. But since the manufacturer did not think to mention this among all the guff about possible side-effects, most of which I am currently suffering, it seems reasonable to assume that it does not matter.

Then I took my pristine car for a service at my local garage, and it returned with a large, ugly chip out of the driver’s door, which apparently they can produce hours of CCTV footage to prove was not their fault. The red mist was positively billowing by this stage.

So that is two local businesses I probably won’t be using again. Slowly but surely the horizons of the irascible narrow. I would go on an anger management course but it would almost certainly give me another heart attack.

There is clearly no point buying a replacement row candle that we never light, so I am going to try ordering an anger candle instead. No, on second thoughts, make that a gross.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.