Sunday, January 20, 2013

The Jungle

 Tampering with food to maximise profit is nothing new. It’s been going on for centuries. It happened in Roman times, medieval times and Victorian times. More recently there have been some potentially deadly cases – salmonella, BSE (which spread because the spinal cords of cows were used in burgers) and E-coli along with exposure of the use of "pink slime".

“What we have got in this case is something that has come with 20th-century capitalism, which is you’ve got very long supply chains,”
says London’s City University Tim Lang . “If you want a burger you can go into your butcher, see a slab of meat, ask for a kilo, get it minced up, take it home add onions, spices, egg and you have a burger. But because we don’t have the time or the skills or the inclination to do it, we hand over that responsibility to a company and when we do that there is an always an incentive to produce cheaper goods with cheaper ingredients.” Not everyone can afford to shop at a butcher’s. Many people survive from one pay cheque to the next, and rely on low budget supermarket-brand "value ranges". But they, too, expect their food to be uncontaminated.

Meat processing has ­become a vast industrialised process carried out by a handful of large companies which is shifting vast quantities of different body parts from different animals. These processors are under constant pressure to keep the prices of their products down, despite the cost of beef rising as a result of increasing demand for grain, so it’s hardly surprising if corners are being cut. Burgers, particularly value range burgers, where the meat content can be as low as 59 per cent, are easy targets because the processors are allowed to bulk out their product with cheaper ingredients such as fillers – additives derived from high-protein powders usually from beef carcasses which are often imported from abroad.

In many socialist's book collection will be Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the story of the Chicago slaughter-houses. Closer to home John Maclean wrote about the Greenock Jungle. 

Socialists aren't at all surprised nor will be any more surprised the next time when some scandal about food adulteration inevitably arises.  

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