It is wrong to be given something other than what you paid for, plain and simple.
It matters little if the thing you receive is better or worse quality than what you expected to get – as long as stuff A is being paraded as stuff B, it is wrong.
Hence the current scandal surrounding the presence of horsemeat in products labelled as beef. I know that horsemeat in and of itself is safe to consume, and I know that this ‘contamination’ of meat products in our supermarkets poses no risk to human health. I even know there are people in other parts of the world who would go out of their way to get it on their plate.
But that is not the point. It’s about consumer confidence. I saw somewhere that for every pound spent in Britain, 60 pence goes to the tills of the country’s retail giants – ready meals taking a large slice of this. Brits spend billions on processed food every year. However, a survey by the market research firm Consumer Intelligence reveals that trust in labels and supermarkets has been hit hard by the horsemeat crisis. That sure can’t be good for the economy.
Having said that, since when did horse being sold as beef become the single issue thing on the agenda? Since when did the recession become old news? Elections in many countries are upcoming that will actually affect human lives, yet even that seems to have been pushed into the background in recent week. It seems nobody is immune from the horsemeat scandal.
Even Britain’s houses of parliament are under investigation, with four meals withdrawn from the building’s restaurant menus as a precaution. It makes me shake my head. Seriously, meals are now being investigated? In a country whose future in the European Union is in doubt? Where recession is probably the worst it has ever been, and with predictions of things getting even more dire? All of that is put on the back foot to investigate some stodgy canteen meals?
That, I’m sorry, is simply not right. I do think selling horsemeat as beef is wrong, but there are bigger and more urgent things that should command more space in our attention box.
Olajide Jatto is a software engineer and writer based in Dublin.
