Taste and Trust

This week has been full of the scandal surrounding horsemeat masquerading as beef. I am a natural vegetarian. I never liked the taste and texture of meat as a child and growing up in the hippy era, it was easy to avoid it once I left home. I have eaten meat to avoid embarrassment when it has been cooked for me. I know it doesn't make me ill or sick. When I worked in Morocco I would be invited home by some of the students, and meat was what was served to guests. I have cooked chicken and bacon for my children. It's a matter of taste most of the time, and ethics some of the time. Vegetarian cuisine is so much more varied and international, and because I am squeamish easier for me to cook. I appreciate that the powers that be are saying horsemeat isn't harmful. The jury still seems to be out on whether it might sometimes contain potentially harmful drugs.I also recognise that there are many creatures that provide food in different cultures, including squirrels, rabbits, ostriches, hares and even rats and dogs. It's a cultural thing.When I lived in Casablanca there was a horse butcher's stand in the Marchee Central with a beautiful plaster painted model of a horse's head to advertise its wares. When my friend's son made the connection he turned vegetarian. Meat was raw there- exposed to the flies, out on the street, whole sheep or goats slaughtered in public, bunches of chickens hanging from their legs on motorbike handles. In this country we have become very distanced from our food sources, not least because of the popularity of processed food, especially meat products. At boarding school we were served beef and gravy that came out of a tin. I am convinced that those slices of meat were horse. I have never seen beef with that sort of muscle fibre. Years later on family holidays in Anglesey, I was aware that some of the horses grazing in the fields next to the caravan site were on their way from Ireland to the continent as a food product. Not so many years ago I was told I could purchase a rescue pony for my children via the business connection of a friend. The business sent horses and ponies from the UK to the continent for slaughter. Earlier this week, with all the fuss about horsemeat, I wondered if I had remembered this offer correctly. The local press ran an article today about proposed protests at a Bakewell based business, doing just this, so I guess that would have been the source of my rescue pony. We don't eat choose to eat horses here - at least not knowingly. While I am sure there are meat eaters who would be curious or unconcerned if they did, this is about trust. It's not just about whether anyone has been harmed by it. It's about food being what it claims it is, doing what it says on the tin. In this time of banking scandals and government spin and u-turns we are treated as fools in so many ways, but please don't assume we are foolish.I will never forget reading a very small article in a national paper when the scandal of BSE broke. I was weaning my daughter on home cooked vegetarian food at the time. Heinz had released a statement to reassure customers that their baby food did not contain brain or spinal cord. I wonder how many of us had ever considered that it might.