That horse has bolted

I fear I may be trying to jump onto a long departed bandwagon here, given that the storm over the Tesco debacle has been raging for a good few weeks now.  A more with it blogger would have taken straight to her computer to pound out a few pages of outraged diatribe the minute the news broke but not I!  This is mostly because I like to see whether something is really truly worthy of my consideration before I blog about it.  At first I thought that this was just going to illicit a few hysterical headlines and some horse gags before finally dying down and disappearing but I was wrong.

Not only are we still talking (and laughing) about it all; yet more food related screw ups are coming to light.  It now transpires that Findus is amongst the brands whose ready meals are thought to contain horsemeat.  This is one of those scenarios that I wish I was surprised by but I’m not.  The fact that big corporations pack their ready meals with just about anything, package it and then sell it onto an unsuspecting public really does not amaze me in the slightest.  Sure, we have laws that are supposed to protect the consumer by discouraging these kinds of shenanigans but when did the law ever stop big corporations from doing anything.  If recent times have taught us anything it is that the law does not apply to you if you are rich and powerful enough.  And Tescos is both very rich and very powerful.  When it comes down to it the only thing that these companies truly care about is making a profit and as long as they are still doing that then everything else is of secondary importance.  I very much doubt that this horse meat fiasco will have made that much of an impact on Tesco’s profit margins because people do still need to eat, however pissed off they may be that what they thought was a juicy beef burger is actually Black Beauty slathered in BBQ sauce. 

The only bit of the whole episode that took me by surprise was the outrage.  Apparently, people were perfectly at ease with tucking into cows and pigs but were practically hysterical once they realised that they may have inadvertently eaten a cute little horse.  Why?  Surely if you are perfectly at ease with gorging on the flesh of one animal, eating another animal wouldn’t be that much different.  At least, the principle is still the same.  The animal was once alive and now it isn’t because it is on your plate glistening in all its gravified goodness....yum.  Plus, I’m assuming that many of those who purchased and ate the offending products didn’t actually realised that they had been duped since a large proportion of those would have purchased said products multiple times.

Then it dawned on me.  It is not necessarily people being squeamish about eating horses (well, ok it largely is); it is more about the fact that people thought that they were getting one thing when they were actually getting something different.  If they have been fooled once then how many times and with how many other products has this happened?  What else is in our food that we don’t know about?  Cats, frog’s eyeballs, dinosaur bollocks?  Who the hell knows? It is Tesco’s after all.  There could literally be anything in your gourmet microwavable spaghetti bolognaise.  It genuinely doesn’t bare thinking about.  Plus, it is an issue of trust.  Nobody likes being lied to, especially if those lies are about things that we are buying and potentially feeding our families. 

I’m just hoping that Tesco’s don’t establish a used car arm of their business because God only knows what they’d try and sell you; hearses masquerading as people carriers, pushbikes with no wheels, etc.  You just never know what they will think up next (and you probably wouldn’t want to) but hey, that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?  It could be the start of a whole new dinner party game: guess what’s in your burger!