Food has been in the news quite a bit over the last few
weeks, and for the most part, the news has not been good. Horse meat, it seems,
has found its way into a large number of processed foods, and is appearing in
various European retailers labeled as beef in hamburgers, lasagne, Swedish
meatballs (say it ain’t so, IKEA) and other products. There is a Trojan horse
joke to be made here, but I’m far too classy to make it.
No cases of horse meat have been reported in the United States as of yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time. Stories about giraffe and kangaroo meat finding their way into the food chain in South Africa are now popping up.
I think a lot of the stories about the horse meat scandal
have missed the point, though. Many of them have a kind “Ewwwww…I ate horse!”
element to them. I have, I admit, never eaten horse (not knowingly, anyway),
but it really doesn’t strike me as especially gross or horrifying. The always
smart and funny (but usually profane, so NSFW) Lindy West wrote about this for Jezebel, noting that the line between horse and cow is a purely arbitrary,
culturally-imposed one, and that those of use who are comfortable consuming
cows really have no business clutching our pearls at the notion of eating
horse. And after all, no one has indicated that there are any safety issues
here—horse is consumed in many parts of the world, and it will not do people
any bodily harm.
But the real story here, I would argue, is whether we can trust the labels that are put on food products. For years,
doctors and nutritionists have been urging us to read the labels on the
foods that we buy, and many of us do. Beware of processed foods, they say, and
of foods that contain ingredients that you do not recognize or cannot
pronounce. All of this is sound advice. But that advice presumes that the food
manufacturers are telling us the truth. What good does reading a label do us if
the label itself is a lie?
This is not a new problem. It has long been known that much
of the seafood sold in the United States has been mislabeled. A recent study indicated that as much as one third of the fish sold in this country is not properly identified.
Sushi restaurants seem to be the worst offenders, followed by other
restaurants. Grocery stores have the fewest problems, which is comforting for
home cooks, I suppose. But even then, how many of us could look at a skinless, boneless fish
fillet labeled “Red Snapper” and be certain that it was accurately labeled? For
that matter, who can look at a package of ground meat and determine whether it
is actually beef or not?
This is where being able to cook for oneself pays off. It’s
not perfect, by any means, but if you are buying scratch ingredients and
cooking them in your own kitchen, the likelihood of buying something that is
fake or falsely labeled goes down dramatically. I know how to identify things like apples, butternut
squash, chickens, onions and so on. But even then, there are questions. I do
not, as regular readers know, make my own stocks and broths, which means I’m
dependent on industrial producers for those ingredients, and I have to hope
that they contain what the label says. And like most people, I eat out from
time to time, and have to rely on the honesty of the restaurant and its
purveyors. Anthony Bourdain shone a harsh light onto the restaurant experience
in his book Kitchen Confidential, which taught me to never order a seafood
special on a Monday night, among other things.
It’s all very well for food writers to tell us consumers to
“caveat emptor,” but how exactly are
we supposed to do that? This is one of those cutesy one-liners that sounds
vaguely helpful but that has almost no basis in reality—rather like when a
television chef/celebrity urges the viewer to “ask your fishmonger.” We can cook,
we can avoid processed foods, we can try to shop at farmer’s markets and so
forth, but short of actually tracing the supply chain of everything we eat,
there’s not much an individual consumer can do. Increased controls and
regulations might have some impact, but are unlikely given the sequester in the
United States.
But even if we get tighter regulations AND the enforcement
to back them up, we will have to face one other problem: food prices will
probably increase. The drive for cheap food is ultimately behind this problem.
Why did those European food producers use horse instead of beef? To save
money—horse meat is cheaper than cow meat. The drive to make any product down
to a price is going to lower its quality; when that product is food, the
results can be unpleasant. We have every right to know what we're eating, and we are entitled to have our food clearly and honestly labeled. However, we should also be aware, and be prepared, that any such improvements will come at a price. We will either have to reconcile ourselves to paying more, or we will probably have to reconcile ourselves to eating things we have not been accustomed to eating in the past.
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