Let Them Eat Crap

You obviously will know about the horsey in the national diet if you are British, on the assumption that you have not been away on Mars for the past few weeks.  For the rest of the world, those who are blissfully ignorant of these shores, let me just say that the British public, or the poorer part of it, was being fed horse meat pretending to be beef. 

Shocking! Shocking!  Mind you, I’m not convinced that those who buy tripe (possibly?) like Findus’ or Tesco’s deep frozen lasagne really know or care what they are eating, so long as it has a meaty taste.  Then there are the burgers.  Lord alone knows what’s in those.  Actually, we do know – udders, guts, sexual parts, all rendered down; revolting enough, even when it is not horse. 

There was a readers’ poll in the Daily Telegraph recently arising from the horse meat scandal. The question was simple: do you think it acceptable to eat horse meat or not?  I voted no, because I would no more eat horse than I would eat cat or rat.  Rat, yes, this is something I will come on to in a bit or a bite.  The result of the poll - revealed after one had voted - was almost neck and neck, the antis winning by a mere nose.  So, whether or not the pros actually eat horse burgers they do not think there is anything wrong in principle here.

Oh, but there is.  First of all the issue is about honesty.  I know one virtually has to have a PhD now to make sense of the labelling on food products, but at the most basic level people have a right to know if they are eating beef or dog meat.  If they have a preference for dog that’s fine, just as long as they understand what it is they are buying.  I say dog, knowing full well that the Telegraph poll would have produced a far clearer result if that had been the product in question, though there are some places in the world where dog is considered tasty and nutritious. 

The real issue, the issue that is beyond the comprehension of the unimaginative, is that of adulteration; of the corruption of food, a corruption born of the drive to feed the masses with the cheapest product available.  “Let them eat cake”, Marie Antoinette is falsely alleged to have said.  But that is positively benign compared with the “Let them eat crap” of the modern food Tsars.

The adulteration of food was big issue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in England and the United States.  The problem got worse with industrialisation, when cheap food was a necessary corollary of low wages.  In the States it got so bad that the New York Evening Post published a parody of a well-known nursery rhyme;

Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it's labeled chicken.

Upton Sinclair caught the mood in The Jungle, a novel published in 1906, which described the dreadful conditions in the meat packing industry.  But sick lamb pretending to be chicken was not enough for him; oh, no.  He went that step further, claiming that the workers who had the misfortune to fall into the rendering tanks were ground up and sold with the rest as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard! 

We have come a long way since then, with legislation and inspection aimed at reducing corruption (meat) and corruption (human).  No we have not.  If anything the situation is getting worse.  Corruption, in one form or another, is the name of a pretty dirty game; and when it comes to meat things can get an awful lot dirtier.  It’s not really that long since England was beset by the BSE crisis, when it was discovered that rendered meat products was being fed to cattle, with disastrous human results.  We learned from that that we clearly learned nothing.  For now horse is in the stakes and the steaks.

Keep your eye on that horse; keep your eye on the one named Profit, the odds on favourite; for that is what it’s all about.  We have enough pasture in England to produce all of the lamb and beef we need, with pork and chicken not far behind.  But we have become a link in a longer and longer international food chain.  The more extended it gets the greater the opportunity for criminal intervention.  Writing in the New Statesman (Meat Market, 22 February), Colin Tudge rightly asked “If crooks along the tortuous food chain can add horse to our meat products, why not dog, or rat, or cat?”  Yes, why not?  He raises some additional pertinent questions;

Given that the world trade in bushmeat is now vast, why not add bush fat of baboon?  What’s to keep out the meat that has been assigned for pet food?  Why not meat that has been condemned?  What guarantees can be given? 

None, it would appear, though we have had a Food Standards Agency in England for the past twelve years, a guarantor that clearly guarantees nothing.  Then there are the supermarket chains like Findus and Tesco, who have singularly failed to investigate their suppliers.  Then there are the politicians, who assure us that our meat is ‘safe’ when they know full well that, as a member of the European Union, we as a country have no proper control over the product that comes from the Continent.  Horse meat today; cat or rat tomorrow. 

I think there is a strong element of cynicism here.  As I say, the horse to watch is Profit.  The poor - and it is the poor - are the principle victims of our two for one deep frozen food culture.  In the wake of the horse fiasco, super market chiefs are saying that their products are likely to become more expensive, that the days of cheap food are over.  This suggests to me that they already knew that there was something fishy, make that horsey, about the stuff they were selling, that or they simply did not ask too many pertinent questions.  Get ‘beef’ from Mexico or Bulgaria rather than local suppliers – why not?  It’s cheap and goes very well in burgers and lasagne.

This is a story, as Tudge says, that might turn nastier yet.  The world food chain is out of control, or falling in to the control of unscrupulous profiteers, pirates of all sorts, the sort of people who only care about Profit, the one horse they do not want to see fall.  Inevitably the scandal will settle down as cosmetic changes are made, as politicians issue further assurances and standards are supposedly raised, as the public’s fickle attention turns to some other tale of woe.  Those who have become veggies, fearful of eating horse, will return to meat.  The pendulum will swing the other way in this best of all possible worlds.  At least until it is discovered that the benighted public have been eating something a lot less benign than horse.  In the meantime I would strongly urge you to avoid Durham’s Pure Beef Lard. 

Jamie Oliver – the Nanny Cook

I've discovered that Jamie Oliver, a telly cook who could bore for England, not content with lecturing us on what to eat is now lecturing America in a show called Food Revolution. What follows is my response to this news, posted on a discussion thread. It’s been slightly adapted for use here.

I saw this thread yesterday and decided to hold back, for the simple reason that my first emotion was one of anger at the subliminal message that is being peddled by this ghastly cook, this frightful male Mary Poppins. The reference here is a deliberated one, but let me hold off on this for a bit until I've made some more general points.

So, his preaching from the culinary pulpit is being broadcast in the US as Food Revolution, is it? One should always try to understand revolutions, in politics or in food, by looking at previous examples, by looking at the route they have taken. In this regard America’s present is our past.

The last government here, the government of Tony Blair and latterly Gordon Brown, was one of the worst in our history, chipping away systematically at all sorts of civil liberties, seeking to micro-manage lives, right down to the most intimate and personal levels. Things got so bad that it was even the subject of a book - Philip Johnston’s Bad Laws. In the introduction he made the following points;

Yet despite the claim to represent the British people, New Labour actually felt like an alien interloper in an ancient land, preaching the fetish of modernism and despising tradition. It evinced a predisposition to micromanage individual behaviour and ride roughshod over liberties, both of which are very non-British traits.

I wrote my own gloss on this book, posted on 17 May last year (Bad Law), but for short here is one key passage;

We now have more CCTV cameras than any other nation in the world though there is no evidence at all that they are effective in reducing crime. We are observed even more closely than the citizens of such places as North Korea and Cuba. We are beset by armies of parking enforces and clampers, as well as being pestered by a growing army of health fascists. The smoking ban threatens to destroy the pub, one of the great British institutions. Latterly the nation’s health supremo has alluded to the deleterious effects of ‘passive drinking.’ Even school lunch boxes, an intimate bond between parent and child, can be investigated by the healthy eating brigade.

Yes, that's one dimension of this appalling onslaught - the fascists of the healthy eating brigade. And who do you think they adopted as an avatar, who do you think Tony Blair adopted as the food guru, one who would bring a 'revolution' in eating, focused on school lunches? I don't think I need to say, do I?

Oliver was sold as the food Poppins; well, he wasn't; that's just how I see it - a sanctimonious, hectoring Hector, who was out to 'reform' the nation's eating habits. Up and down the country schools, anxious not to appear out of step, anxious not to be victimised by the snoopers, the government inspectors and the do-gooders, adopted 'healthy lunches'.

People were even empowered, as I have said, to look at the contents of lunch boxes and send lecturing written warnings to parents if they did not like what they saw. Even in the worst days of Soviet tyranny I doubt things ever went that far. What was the result? 'Healthy' options went uneaten; children went hungry; mothers were seen at school gates, handing through emergency 'food aid.'

It really is appalling that this disease has now hit the States, this nannying Jamie-knows-best approach. I see from one recent news report that Chicago has even banned home made lunches. My God, what’s happened to America, what's happened to the Land of the Free, when this sort of state-tyranny is allowed to pass without major protest? How far are people prepared to allow things to go? What’s next: compulsory work camps for the deviant eaters?

Oliver is no more than the populist face of the nanny state, a lisping culinary megalomaniac and school-dinner obsessive, as Brendan O’Neil wrote in last week’s edition of the Spectator. If that's not bad enough he, so far as America is concerned, is a foreigner, a sanctimonious outsider. Actually if the American people like him so much I wish they would adopt him on a permanent basis. The sooner my country is free of this ass the better.

I'm annoyed; it's obvious I'm annoyed, but I do emphasise it's not at those who watch this show - it's at the lie they are being sold, that people can be corralled like sheep into adopting a 'healthy' lifestyle, the kind of lifestyle sanctioned by Oliver and his insufferable kind. For America to be seduced by this condescending and patronising food moralist is just too awful. If the price of freedom is fat kids then let it be.

By the Rivers of Babylon

I was reminded of an experience I had with food by a discussion on Blog Catalogue. The discussion itself concerned good experience with bad food. My experience, as I said there, was neither good nor bad; just an experience, and what an experience.

We were in Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by the local people). Have you ever had pho? It’s really super, large bowls of soup, with fish or chicken, or whatever your preference happens to be. It comes with lots of vegetable accompaniments, to be added to the pho bowl according to preference. There, on the table, amongst the other things, was a little dish of chopped salad onions. At least that’s what I thought it was. It wasn’t: it was chopped green chillies, a kind I’d never seen before.

So, thinking nothing of it, I spooned them abundantly into my bowl. All unawares, just one spoonful was all it took. Wow! I like spicy food, and I like chillies; I’m particularly fond of Mexican cuisine. But this was different; these chillies were not hot; they were lethal. As I wrote on Blog Catalogue, it was as if an atom bomb had gone off inside my mouth, and that is the mildest way of describing the sensation. It was a hotness of quite unbelievable intensity.

I started to cough uncontrollably. Quick, a mouthful of cold beer! That was absolutely no use at all, even several mouthfuls. The Vietnamese waitresses were so sweet; they knew exactly what was wrong, bringing me glasses of warm water, which, for reasons I cannot explain, really did have a calming effect. But, as always, that which did not kill me only made me stronger…and more wary.

I really will try anything once when it comes to food. In my travels I’ve had all sorts of unusual things. I was going to try bear in Russia but the waiter advised against it, saying that it was an acquired taste, and since it was my first night in Moscow, since I was tired and hungry, I really did not feel like experimenting. The blini with caviar and soured cream were excellent though!

Sometimes the best meals are the simplest, though often the setting, the context in which one dines, significantly adds to the pleasure. Eating barbequed sardines overlooking a Spanish beach is lovely. Then there was the substantial local gazpacho I had in Cordoba, a restaurant near the Mezquita, or having luncheon with some wonderful friends in the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penn or dinner at Per Se in New York. But the best of all, the meal that has yet to be exceeded for pleasure in taste, the pleasure in setting and the pleasure in the company was one of fried fish ( I have no idea what it was) sitting by the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda, red with the sinking sun. That truly was divine. Some memories are so sweet; some moments truly are magic.