Tim Black Venomous veggies and radical rice As Western horsemeat-haters lambast modern food production, in Asia it looks set to improve millions of lives.

Zero: UN Environment Programme

For lovers of irritating puns, the horsemeat scandalette, in which a few putatively beefy products have turned out to feature a hint of equine, has been like a red rag to a bona-fide, DNA-checked bullock. ‘And they’re off’, being a favourite best-before-based word play. But it’s not just the nation’s punners who have made hay while the Sun sensationalises. The horsemeat scandal has also attracted a far less benign social constituency: the misanthropic.

For members of this elite group, be they smug metropolitan media types usually to be found sniffing round Whole Foods, or besuited bureaucrats looking for something to do, the horsemeat scandal is not what it seems. That is, it is not the result of a minority of fraudulent suppliers indulging in the age-old trick of adulteration. That would be too banal, too unscandalous. It would also require too much historical perspective. No, what they see in the horsemeat story is an indictment of us, the consumers, a condemnation of our insatiable desire for cheap food, in particular, cheap meat. That is why horsemeat ended up in a few lasagnes: because our demand for cheap food meant that corners (and hooves, and bums, and testicles) were cut.

And the solution this insufferable contingent propose? Eat less meat. And pay more for it. The United Nations Environment Programme announced: ‘Portion size is key. Many portions are too big, more than you want to eat.’ Eat less, a spokesman continued, ‘make it special’. The UNEP wasn’t alone of course. It was merely the official end of the wedge. At the thicker, more unabashedly snobbish end, broadsheet-dwelling no-marks have been flicking off screeds on ‘the true, titanic horror of modern meat-production’. One even asserted that ‘the case for vegetarianism has grown ever-more urgent, and unanswerable’. According to the Guardian, this message needs to be targeted at the real cause of the horsemeat scandal: ‘people hooked on cheap, easy and overly plentiful food.’ That’s code for you and me, by the way…

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