What's your beef?

So your ‘beef’ turns out to be horsemeat.

And you’re surprised? 

Soon they’ll say bears poop in the woods and the pope’s a catholic! 

Everyone agrees this is terrible. 

But why is it such an outrage?

 

It’s about consumer information – meat sold as beef was actually horse!
No, this isn’t just about choosy cheeseburger-chompers being miserably misled.  Nobody likes to be fooled.  But if it’s merely about labelling, it’d be fine for mince to include horse-flesh, just as long as long as it’s labelled so.  Yet the meat industry goes to great lengths to hide what you are eating.  The verbal deceit is to speak of dead cows as ‘beef’, slaughtered pigs as ‘pork'; the visual lie to mince the flesh to disguise your offal, testicles and eyeballs into one lifeless lump.  No, there’s more to explain here.

It’s about public safety – horse meat contains dangerous drugs

No, that's not it either.  Of course it’s not smart to eat meat that contains harmful chemicals – but again, that applies to the antibiotics pumped into your cows and chickens just as much as horse flesh.  The latest scandal elicited a government statement that tacitly admitted as much: this is not so much about public safety as consumer confidence and protecting meat industry profits. 

It’s about criminal activity – horse meat comes from shady, illegal slaughterhouses in Romania

Nice try, but flesh is big business – it’s the powerful multinational meat industry that’s in the dock here, along with the meat departments at your local supermarkets.  A criminal conspiracy scapegoating the tinkering romanies – will we really let them wriggle out of it so easily?

It’s about ethics – it’s wrong to eat horses

At last, we agree!  But why?  For us increasingly smug veggies, there’s a simple and consistent line:  unnecessary pain and death are wrong, so we enjoy a diet of healthy fruit, veg, cereals, pulses and nuts, with or without dairy and eggs – and avoid all meat.  But if you want to pick through the bones of what you have killed, on what basis do you do it?  Why have cows sent to their death but not horses?  Do you draw an arbitrary line at slaughtering pets? (so are rabbits or fish pets or food?).  Do you discriminate on the grounds of ‘usefulness’ to spare horses and dogs the knife?  Or ‘intelligence', conveniently forgetting the clever pigs whilst ripping into a silly chick? 

At least we’ve found the crux of the issue:  this is indeed about ethics.  But you will be looking an awful long time to find a relevant and consistent moral criterion to justify killing animals and not humans, let along killing some animals and not others.

Frankly, if you’re still eating meat, you’re lost in a moral maze. 

You can bury your head in the hedge for as long as you want.  But the only clear way out leads to the green and pleasant land of the veggies.

Maybe now is a good time to come and join us?