The whole meat burger saga reveals something extremely serious – the existence of a two-tier regulatory system
The real scandal of the burger story is not that beef has been contaminated with horse flesh. It is that the food chain is contaminated with something much more toxic – poverty.
In November 1999, I wrote a story in The Irish Times about beef that wasn’t beef. In the working class Dublin suburb of Clondalkin, people were being sold tins of something marked as “beef in juice” with a picture of a healthy-looking cow on the label.
The brand-name was “Emerald” and the product was marked “Dept of Agriculture Ireland Inspected and Passed”. The owner of a company actually called Emerald Meats, Jonnie McCarthy, was alarmed about this because he knew the “beef” didn’t come from his firm.
So he bought three cans and asked the food analysis laboratory at Teagasc’s National Food Centre to analyse their contents. The lab’s then director, Michael O’Keeffe, told me at the time that the tests, “suggested to us that the main meat content was pork”. Very small amounts of beef and poultry might be present, but essentially the “beef in juice” was almost all pig.
I thought at the time that this was a pretty big story, especially since the Department of Agriculture admitted that it had indeed “inspected and passed” the meat – and certified that pork was beef. But, as it happened, almost nobody gave a damn.
Pat Rabbitte and Des O’Malley raised the issue with the then minister for agriculture, Joe Walsh (now looking after the “public interest” at Bank of Ireland).
Walsh confirmed that the meat had been processed by Irish Country Meats in Roscommon, part of the Glanbia group. He explained that the cans had been intended for the Russian market, which then collapsed. They were kept in storage until two years after their sell-by dates, when they were “sold on as pet food”.
He gave no explanation as to how the meat (which was not marked or sold as pet food) had ended up in the human food chain. And that was that. There was no major investigation, no prosecutions, little media interest and no political scandal.
To explain why, I have to leave the realms of established facts and enter those of gut feelings. My hunch was that the key issue was where the meat was being sold and who it was being sold to. It was being flogged off at four cans for £1 (€1.27) in the great reservations of low income people west of Dublin.
It was cheap rubbish, two years out of date, that no one with a decent wage would ever dream of eating. It was fill-up-your-belly stuff for poor kids. It wasn’t being exported and it wasn’t going to be on the dinner tables of anyone who might matter.
What was in those cans was what’s called MRM – mechanically recovered meat – the product of a process used to extract shreds of meat from the bones of slaughtered animals after the recognisable cuts have all been taken.
I wrote at the time that “MRM can lawfully be used, but it ought to be subject to especially tight controls . . . because the meat is not recognisable as coming from any particular part of an animal. Tight controls on its use are therefore essential.” And this, of course, is precisely the lesson that was not learned. Because nobody cared very much, the question of what kind of rubbish was going into the making of cheap meat for poor people was of little interest.
For all the balm of reassurance that has been poured over the whole filly mignon story, it actually reveals something extremely serious – the existence of a de facto two-tier regulatory system.
Everybody accepts that Ireland, after all the appalling practices revealed in the beef tribunal, now has a very good mainstream system of control and tracing of meat. If you can afford to buy a steak, or a prime Irish angus burger or even some identifiable stewing beef, it’s almost certainly an excellent product that has been carefully inspected. But if you can’t, you’re getting stuff which, as we now know, can scarcely have been inspected at all.
For all the soothing noises from officialdom, it is undeniable that there has been a very serious breach in the wall of supervision that should surround the production of meat.
The Department of Agriculture did not know, until a diligent food safety authority told it, that the most basic fact it was certifying in relation to tens of millions of burgers – that they were made of beef – was not true. This is a general flaw in the whole system, but it is also a specific illegality.
What’s been played down in the official explanations is that it is illegal to trade in minced horse meat. This is entirely clear from the regulations: “Minced meat is authorised for intra-EU trade or import into the EU only if it is prepared from fresh meat from bovines, sheep and goats or swine. Minced meat from other species (eg equine and poultry) may not be traded or imported.”
It is now obvious that these laws have been routinely broken both in the import of meat protein to be added to cheap burgers and in the export of those burgers to the UK. It is equally obvious that the inspection regime failed to notice any of this illegality.
This suggests that the authorities have been paying little attention to our old friend MRM – the gunk we feed to poor kids. One of the best jokes spawned by this whole affair is the repeated assurance that this doesn’t pose any threat to human health.
The threat it poses derives, not from the fact that it is from horses but the fact that it is full of saturated fat, one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic that disproportionately affects the poor.
It is a matter of certainty that this will lead to strokes, heart disease and early death. If this represents, “no danger to human health”, it can only be because those who consume it belong to some other species.