If the pork ban leads to better practice in the feed factories, it will be seen as a good thing, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
SATURDAY: ATE rasher sandwich. With mustard. Feel okay. Drive through frost-filled, fog-drenched Irish countryside, admiring Ireland in December. Arrive home to find that all pork products have been recalled. That the owner of our corner shop is binning all his ham pizzas. As a good consumer try level best to feel worried about own health but even my top-performing hypochondria isn't up to this. More worried about pig farmers. Sleep well.
Sunday. Discover that we have no pork products in our fridge to throw away. In any event that old salami was not made from Irish pork, having been bought in evil foreign supermarket. Feel a bit left out.
Ring Food Safety Authority's (FSA) helpline (1890 33 66 77) in an effort to participate in national drama. Ring at 11.44am, noon and 12.15pm.
A young female voice says that all their lines are busy at the moment, but if I leave message they will return my call as soon as possible. Then spooky English voice comes on to the FSA helpline and says: "Record your message at the tone. When you are finished hang up or hold for more options."
God almighty, even our phone services are imported. More angry about this than about the pork being recalled.
Still worried about pig farmers. More responsible adults are talking about traceability and are busily binning all their bacon. But what's the point in having traceability if, as the FSA has stated, all pigs are slaughtered in the same factories, and you can't separate the contaminated pork products from the uncontaminated ones? Have terrible desire for a sausage.
Dimly remember suggesting that we have a pork steak for dinner on Friday, and having been overruled by the catering committee which, although low in numbers, is high in aggression. Quite a row ensued. We had spaghetti instead. Today both members of the catering committee are looking pretty pleased with themselves. Still cross about that.
Of course the recall of all pork products from pigs slaughtered since September 1st is very serious. But the thing about consumers is, we're flighty. Oh, we're flighty. We are inclined to get scared and bolt. Our decisions about what food to buy are emotional as well as economic.
There is no logic to us really, which is just as well, because the consumer authorities don't have any logic to them either. On the one hand they're saying that there's absolutely nothing to worry about; on the other hand they've instituted what is in effect a blanket ban on pork products. This is the kind of behaviour any five-year-old child could see through, and habitually does.
About the pig industry your average consumer knows absolutely nothing. There are times, after a couple of glasses of wine in a foreign country, that we might drunkenly say "Irish ham is the finest in the world" but these statements are embarrassing and made from a position of total ignorance, shortly before we burst into our version of Spancil Hilland cry about emigrating, even though we never have.
What your average consumer does know, though, is that food has become a sort of social bomb, which can explode at the most unfortunate moments; and surely no moment can be more unfortunate than the weeks coming up to Christmas.
We've lived through quite a lot of food scares over the past two decades, giving up eggs and then beef as the UK had its salmonella and then its BSE scares. There was foot and mouth. There was blue tongue. To non-farmers these outbreaks were mysteries; we still don't know exactly how or why they started or finished.
The Irish farming industry is regarded by most non-farmers, rightly or wrongly, as a series of scams perpetrated by cute country people who have been getting away with it for years.
This makes farmers understandably furious; but even they might admit that consumers only hear about farmers and farming when things go disastrously wrong.
The last time pig farmers intruded on the public consciousness in any significant way was when a couple of them were fined for destroying rivers by releasing slurry into them. And the bovine TB scandal (is it over yet?) never did much to instil public confidence in the agricultural authorities.
Then there is the whole organic movement, which is founded on suspicion, and a sure-fire method to guarantee that food became even more of a class indicator than it already was.
The children of the privileged munch their way through appallingly expensive organic chicken and organic vegetables and the children of everybody else are, it is assumed by the organic movement, negligently filled with toxins and growth hormones and will consequently, it is also strongly implied by the organic movement, die screaming. A scare like this one over pork products only reinforces this food apartheid.
For the pig farmers, of course the FSA ruling is a catastrophe. But if the ban is shown to have been justified, and if it leads to better practice in the feed factories - which seem, to the untutored eye, to be the source of an awful lot of food scares - then perhaps it will be seen to have been a good thing.
It will go some way to restoring consumer confidence in the safety of Irish produced food, and the consumer might be recaptured sooner than we think.