LONDON — With Europe’s expanding horse meat scandal escalating from a drama to a crisis, consumers are being warned that the era of cheap food may be over.
In less than a month, the scandal has spread from Ireland, where prepared foods sold as beef products were found to contain horse, to Britain and much of the Continent.
The crisis deepened on Thursday when British officials said tests showed that a powerful equine drug, potentially harmful to human health, may have entered the food chain, my colleague Stephen Castle writes.
As European officials called on Europol, the European police agency, to coordinate investigations into what could turn out to be extensive Continent-wide fraud by criminal gangs, supermarkets in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands became the latest to remove suspect products from their shelves.
Some are already blaming a low-cost food culture for a situation that may have allowed criminals to exploit ever longer and more complex food supply chains to dump cheap horse meat into the market.
The potential illicit profits could be huge. France’s Nouvel Observateur, tracing the possible itinerary of a horse meat lasagne, said that the route from a Romanian abattoir to a French or British supermarket shelf passed through numerous intermediaries with an opportunity to switch horse for beef.
With horse meat two or three times cheaper, the magazine wrote, “the profit from the switch is reckoned to be €300,000 [$400,000] for every 25 tonnes.”
In an era of affluence, Europeans became accustomed to spending a diminishing portion of their weekly household budgets on food. But with strapped families facing tighter budgets at a time of austerity and rising international food prices, the trend has reversed.
Supermarkets have responded by attempting to keep prices down at the expense, according to critics, of content and quality.
“In a highly competitive market our food industry has not changed its business model,” according to Laura Sandys, a Conservative legislator, writing in The Times of London on Thursday. “Instead it has tried to adapt to food inflation by fitting a more expensive product into a cheap price structure.”
Ms. Sandys, concluding that “the era of cheap food is, sadly, over,” said consumers were unwittingly absorbing the rising costs of meat and grain through reductions in quality and quantity.
“So the £1 [$1.55] cottage pie in your local freezer shop will be the same price that it has been for years,” she wrote, “but today will contain less meat and more artificial fillers such as high fructose corn syrup.”
Pamela Robinson, a supply chain expert at the University of Birmingham in Britain, told The Daily Telegraph, that pressure to sell food more and more cheaply had led to the horse meat scandal.
She said supermarkets were going to have to acknowledge food prices needed to go up if they were to guarantee quality. Families also needed to be educated on how to eat healthily on a budget, rather than relying on cheap processed foods that could no longer guarantee quality.
In the midst of the horse meat scandal, some consumers are already voting with their feet.
A poll for the Sky News broadcaster indicated one-in-five British shoppers had changed their buying habits since the scandal broke. More than half of those had abandoned processed meat entirely.
Traditional butcher shops supplying well-sourced but more expensive meat have meanwhile reported a spike in sales of up to 30 percent.
In the spirit of the times, the BBC published a handy guide to healthy alternatives to pre-packaged, industrially processed foods.
The broadcaster’s Hannah Briggs quoted gastronomes who sang the praises of brined ox tongue and beef brisket, adding: “You could also try curing pig cheeks or chaps in salt and seasoning with Indonesian long pepper and herbs.”
But is the European public really ready to return to a mythical age in which a family of four could go for a week on a boiled cow heel or a pot of tripe? Or will we have to adjust to spending more for our food and less on luxuries?
Tell us if you think it’s inevitable, or even sensible, to spend more on our food. How much of your weekly budget goes to feeding the family? And how about some useful alternatives to expensive cuts? Cow heel recipes, anyone?
