Durban - It’s traditional at this time of year to look back on the year that was. The first thing that came to mind was arguably the biggest consumer story of the year – the “donkey” meat scandal.
The story first appeared in this column in early December last year, when the results of the Stellenbosch University food scientists’ DNA-testing of samples of processed meat revealed that 68 percent contained meat species not declared on the label.
Chicken and pork were the most undeclared meat species, the latter being the most alarming, given the cultural and religious significance. But it was the less conventional butchery meat which had the biggest shock factor – a single sample of processed meat was found to contain donkey, four samples tested positive for goat, and another four for water buffalo.
The story got some radio coverage at the time, as well as an airing on Carte Blanche, but it wasn’t until the university re-released the findings of that same study on the back of the massive horsemeat scandal that erupted in Europe early this year that the story really took off here.
Suddenly the words “donkey meat” were on everyone’s lips, there were outraged demands for the university to “name and shame” the offending suppliers, and the National Consumer Commission said it would conduct its own investigation into the dodgy meat practices.
The upshot was that in the vast majority of cases, the mislabelling was said to be unintentional, not deliberate. Many local retailers acknowledged that they didn’t clean their massive mincing machines between batches of different meat species, hence some contamination, and vowed to introduce procedures to eliminate this.
Either way, consumers had been buying a product believing it contained a certain meat species, when in fact it contained one or more other species, which were not declared on the label.
Speaking of which, back in 2004, award-winning London-based journalist Felicity Lawrence wrote Not on the Label, an exposé of “what really goes into the food on your plate”.
I devoured, and reviewed, this shocking report of the goings-on in the global food industry at the time. It has now been republished, “with extraordinary new material on the horsemeat scandal”.
In her introduction, Lawrence looks back on what has changed in nine years and concludes: “The persistent ills of the system are all too clear in this latest (horsemeat) saga of the mass adulteration of what we eat… The forces, economic, political and cultural, that led us down the path of degraded, industrialised food remain.”
If you have any interest in what goes on before that ready-meal hits the supermarket freezer, you’ll find the book mesmerising.
Lawrence makes the point that the “horse” was all found in bottom-of-the-range discount foods, “not the sort of things foodies or posh people buy”.
“There was a distinct class element to ‘horsegate’,” Lawrence noted.
Moral of the story: eat the freshest, least adulterated food you can afford.
* Wendy Knowler is Independent Newspapers' consumer editor. Her column Consumer Watch is published twice a week in The Star, Pretoria News, Cape Times and Daily News.
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