American classists imagine Western Europe as an idyllic land where desirable lifestyles, unadulterated foods, and physically attractive, "sophisticated" people live in harmony with the environment and (typically) liberal political values. One expression of this conveniently naive, tastelessly self-centered notion was the Italian portion of
Elizabeth Gilbert's wildly popular memoir
Eat Pray Love.
Reality that's "darker than night," as
Raymond Chandler once observed, has a way of interceding such daydreams. Recently, Western Europe has learned to its shock that a number of meat-based products did not exactly follow truth-in-labeling laws. Horse meat was surreptitiously included in items such as goulash and pasta with bolognese sauce. There has been something of a freakout on the Continent and in the United Kingdom over this quickly expanding horse play. Massive product recalls have been issued by industrial giants, including
Findus and
Nestle. One concern is the identification of funky drugs in the horse meat. With litigation just an ambitious attorney away, Euroland's food kingpins want the evidence out of the marketplace
toute de suite, as the details of a willfully ignorant food production chain grows ominously. (The
zerohedge.com link in the above illustration includes a well-written piece about the corruption and its grim echoes of the attitudes that shaped the subprime mortgage crisis.)
Meanwhile, some Europeans have suggested equine cuisine could remain a viable option for its neediest citizens.
A BBC report notes that German development minister Dirk Niebel advocated that the illegal food be distributed to Europe's poor. Hey, what's wrong with a little horse when you don't have anything else to eat? "We just can't throw away good food," Herr Niebel stated.
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Mr. Ed (left)
(photo: vanityfair.com) |
He has a point. However, the minister did not go so far as to push for the provision of genuinely healthy items for those who can't even afford dog food, never mind ground Trigger. Let them eat horse? There seem to be some historical echoes in that line of reasoning, don't you think?
If a horse could talk, as Mr. Ed did on American TV for years, what do you think it would say about this issue?
