Horse, anyone? Equine spotting in the food chain

The undeservedly discredited horse is again coming in for criticism as a food filler for items that make nary mention of its presence. In a world of mass supply, changing of hands, and bewilderingly complex distribution channels, can anyone be sure that the final product is what it's marked to be? In the food market, this is further compounded by the risk of accretions and additions to processed products on route. Tampering is bound to happen.

To that end, the investigations being conducted in Australia by the program Four Corners might induce something of a yawn. Relying on confidential documents obtained by New South Wales Greens MP Abigail Boyd from the NSW Food Authority, the program found that "hundreds of businesses, including aged care homes, hospitals and catering companies, were issued notices for food safety breaches between 2022 and 2026." Among the trove of items secured by Boyd were privileged documents revealing, in the MP's words, a "concerning number of illegal knackeries and the result is that you've seen horses and other animals ending up in what people would assume to be minced beef or minced lamb."

The issue of labelling, the worn theme of identity, and the notion that food is supposedly meant to be a pure manifestation of authentic flavours and origins is not something that should trouble Australia. Beginning as a penal colony of slop and gristle, roughing it up with British variants, the advent of mass processing was probably a merciful event. Be that as it may, Australia would inherit from its Britannic mother a fondness of the quadruped that did not extend to its use in cooking.

The aversion to munching equine flesh by the English is captured well by Charles Dickens in Household Words, his two-penny weekly launched in March 1850. On April 19, 1856, we find the novelist's reflections on "horse-eating". Personally, he finds much to merit it. "If it will pay to fatten an ox who has served his time in the plough, or a cow who has fulfilled her contribution to the dairy, it would also remunerate the grazier to fatten a horse past work, supposing that his carcass could be disposed of as readily as those of the ruminants." He then turns to the reasons why the English find this unpalatable. "Prejudice, and nothing else! the same prejudice which makes the English refuse to taste frogs and escargots, though both are esteemed and expensive dishes on the continent". That same prejudice afflicted those fussy "Orientals" who repudiated "the flesh of the hog", and starving Irishmen who "would not eat Indian corn."

The other side of prejudice is undue favour, a sort of animal worship. With characteristic bite, the comedian Frank Muir, in his An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything (1976) wittily observed that, "One of the reasons for the low standard of teaching was that it was poorly paid. The English governing class was more interested in the schooling of its horses than of its offspring." The aristocrats and well-to-do sorts would ship off their offspring to boarding schools for their Spartan training, cold baths and hideous nosh, all in the name of building character.

Dickens was also aware of the surreptitious use of horse as a substitute meat. "In Paris, there is a daily clandestine trade in horse-flesh, both for the restaurants, who serve it as fillet of venison; and for the poor, who in that case pay more for it than its real market value." The danger here was the presence of glandered horses at the market, glanders being a serious, infectious condition transmissible to humans. "But, by a public and open sale, under the same authorised inspection as is exercised at the abattoirs, all danger of the kind is avoided."

In 2013, the United Kingdom was again beset by the practice as part of a European wide scandal on the contamination and corruption of food products. It began with tests conducted by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, which found horse DNA in over one-third of sampled frozen beefburgers and ready meals from supermarkets and pig in 85% of them. The UK Food Standards Agency was alerted in November 2012 by the Irish regulator about these irregularities in the supply chain, but the FSA told MPs that it only found out the adulteration in January 2013. "So, just as in France 150 years ago," Hugh Pennington remarked in the London Review of Books, "in Britain and Europe today the fraudster's clandestine trade in horse meat continues, and the poor are still being ripped off."

The New South Wales Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DRIPD) is adamant that horse meat had not been detected in Australian food. In a press release (July 28), the department indignantly claimed to have found no "horse meat in beef, lamb or any food for human consumption." The assertions by the ABC were "misleading and not correct." A spokesperson explained that random surveillance testing was conducted by the department "on meat products for species identification." Horse meat had not been found, nor were there any abattoirs in the state licensed to process horse meat for human consumption. Those engaged in operating illegal knackeries had been prosecuted, the most recent being a case involving the production of horse meat for pet food, largely for the greyhound industry. The individual involved, a certain Adrian Talbot, was subsequently convicted of two charges of operating an unlicensed knackery and unlicensed animal food van in Wagga Wagga Local Court in June, being fined A$12,000 and made to pay A$30,000 in costs.

The question of spotting or identifying unwanted horse flesh in confidently labelled products is part of the broader problem of reliability regarding the product's veracity. Can we ever be sure that the soy sauce we purchase has no trace of human hair? Or that milk powder does not contain traces of melamine added to ostensibly boost protein content? Boyd's procured documents also noted instances of mouse fur in food, metal shavings in bread products, dairy-free products that so happened to have traces of dairy; instances of contamination; and incidents involving the identification of needles in some food. With such glorious finds, it's a wonder anyone ever does the weekly supermarket shop.

Mislabelling should ever be justified. The independent 2011 Labelling Logic review on food labelling law and policy, commissioned by the Australian and New Zealand Ministerial Forum on Food Regulation, handed down 40 public health recommendations for reform. A mere three have been implemented, all concerning alcohol. Jane Martin of the Food for Health Alliance at Cancer Council Victoria states with heavy resignation on food regulation in the country that, "Even when we get to the point of identifying a problem and an evidence-based solution, which often takes years, those solutions aren't implemented."

One should merely put stock in the fact that regulators and labellers cannot be trusted in their breezy confidence on what eventually ends up on the shelves. Best say that a product "may contain" traces of something or rather. Do essentially what some restaurants do for reasons of future exculpation in the event an allergy is aggravated: "This item may contain traces of nuts." Or, in this case, horse.