Will Europe throw out food found to contain horse meat, or eat it?

Until recently, horse meat butchers, with their store signs featuring a red horse’s head, were commonplace in France, and elsewhere in Europe. And so the news of the equine meat scandal reads a little differently there, where people aren’t shocked by the idea of eating horse meat.

The fact that the scandal uncovered horse meat being slipped into dishes otherwise labeled as beef is another matter.

An article in the Paris newspaper Le Monde (link in French) this week posits, “Should we distribute dishes with horse meat or destroy them?� What do you do with all those products containing horse meat labeled as beef that are already in the distribution chain?

In Belgium, the article goes on to say, European Parliament member Marc Tarabella is opposed to throwing them away. He demands that such dishes be distributed rather than destroyed. In Germany, Hartwig Fischer, a deputy of the Christian Democratic Union, had himself filmed while he ate a plate of the suspect lasagna found to include horse meat in order to convince people that “c’est bon� — it’s good — and that one can’t tell the difference from beef.

German minister of development Dirk Niebel sees it this way, the article says: “More than 800 million people die of hunger in the world. And unhappily in Germany, there are also people for whom it is difficult financially, even for food …. I find that one cannot, here in Germany, throw out good nourishment.�

Tarabella wrote a letter to the director general of Findus France, a company that produces some of the lasagna found to include horse meat, urging the company to avoid wasting millions of tons of food, especially “when 10 million disadvantaged Europeans cannot even feed themselves one time a day.� (Note: Feeble translation is entirely my own.)

I think it’s a question that needs to be asked. Yes, fraud or mislabeling is abhorrent. But the food is still edible and shouldn’t be wasted, but rather donated to the poor, relabeled to reflect its content accurately.

According to the article, the company has told Tarabella that for the moment it hasn’t destroyed any of it. The food is on its way back to their storehouses as the company waits for clear instructions from the government.

A poll on Le Monde’s website asks readers whether the dishes in question should be redistributed to the needy: 94% of the respondents say yes, while 6% say no and 2% have no opinion.

I strongly suspect that in this country a similar poll would have very different results.

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