Recipe for Divided Europe: Add Horse, Then Stir
By ANDREW HIGGINS
At a time of immense strains brought on by the euro crisis and
austerity, the horse meat scandal has brought into the open the deep
divisions that bedevil Europe.
Pavel Horejsi for The New York Times
Lenka Cernikova extracting DNA at a veterinary laboratory.
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Published: March 9, 2013
OLOMOUC, Czech Republic — For Zuzana Navelkova, it was just another day
at the office. She showed up for work last month and found a two-pound
bag of frozen Swedish meatballs awaiting her attention.
Pavel Horejsi for The New York Times
Zuzana Navelkova, head of another laboratory’s
virology department, with meatballs that contained horse meat.
“There was nothing unusual, just the normal routine,” recalled Ms.
Navelkova, head of the virology department at a state-financed
veterinary laboratory in this Czech town about 160 miles east of Prague.
Normal, that is, until she found horse meat in the meatballs, retrieved from an Ikea furniture store in the nearby city of Brno.
The discovery, based on DNA testing, did not stir any alarm at the
laboratory, which spends most of its time hunting for deadly health
hazards, not for food-labeling fraud. “I would still eat these
meatballs,” Ms. Navelkova said. “No problem.”
But the results set off a firestorm across Europe, pouring fuel on a
slow-burning scandal that had begun weeks earlier with the first
discovery of horse meat masquerading as beef in Ireland and then Britain. “We never expected this kind of reaction,” Ms. Navelkova said.
Neither, it seems safe to say, did many in Europe, where in normal times
tons of horse meat are consumed every year without causing a stir. The
scandal has cast a pall over Europe’s proudest achievement — a vast
common market that allows the free flow of goods and services across
borders — and even the very idea that Europe’s different nations can
somehow work together to set and enforce common rules.
Consumers are increasingly asking a simple but discomforting question:
Why, in a trading bloc notorious for regulating things like the shape of
bananas and the font size on food labels, was something as simple as
identifying the difference between a cow and a horse so difficult?
And at a time of immense strains brought on by the euro crisis and
Continentwide austerity — when new, anti-European political forces are
rising in country after country — the horse meat scandal has brought
into the open the deep divisions, cultural and otherwise, that bedevil
the European Union.
A meat that nearly all Britons consider revolting, for example, is
cherished as a protein-rich delight by a small but loyal minority in
places like Belgium, the home of the European Union’s Brussels
bureaucracy and Europe’s biggest per capita consumer of horse meat.
(Italy, with its larger population, eats the most horse over all.)
For a surging camp of so-called Euroskeptics in Britain, the fact that
horse meat has entered the food chain through a host of middlemen and
factories scattered across the Continent stands as proof of unbridgeable
cultural chasms that, in their view, make the European Union
unworkable.
“With 27 different countries with completely different cultural
backgrounds, there is no cultural brake on what goes into our food,”
said Godfrey Bloom,
a member of the European Parliament for the United Kingdom Independence
Party, a group that wants Britain to pull out of the bloc. “I don’t
think it is possible at all to have 27 countries agreeing to and
complying with and implementing” the same rules, he said during a recent
hearing on horse meat in Brussels.
The union’s failure to prevent what Ireland’s agriculture minister, Simon Coveney, described
as “fraud on a massive scale across multiple countries” flows from a
deliberate design in the foundations of the so-called European project,
an effort over six decades to push Europe’s once warring nations into a
zone of peace rooted in shared economic and, ultimately, political
sovereignty.
Under an unwieldy system intended to assure national governments that
they can give up some sovereignty but not lose control, legions of
officials at the European Commission, the union’s Brussels-based
executive arm, churn out regulations and directives but lack the
authority or resources to enforce them.
For the most part, that is the province of individual countries. This
means that while Brussels may loom large in the public imagination,
particularly in countries like Britain, as a meddlesome, even
omnipotent, authority, it is actually weak.
“Those who think that the European Union or the Commission has an army
of inspectors and wardens to implement legislation in this field or any
other should know that there is nothing in existence of this sort,” Tonio Borg, the union’s senior official for health and consumer policy, told the European Parliament recently.
The European Commission, he explained, is largely powerless to make sure its rules on food labeling
or anything else get observed, especially in the face of people
determined to manipulate the system. That job, he said, belongs to each
country.
The horse meat fracas has also put a spotlight on the tenacity of
cultural and national stereotypes that were supposed to fade away as a
new common sense of European identity took hold. Particularly pronounced
has been a tendency in the richer nations of Western Europe to point a
finger at what they often see as their poor and unreliable country
cousins in the former Communist East.
When it was first discovered that lasagna on sale in France and Britain contained horse meat, Romania,
the second-poorest country in the European Union, was immediately cast
as the culprit. Fed by mostly fictitious accounts of a mass slaughter of
Romanian horses after the introduction of new traffic rules banning
horse-drawn carts, the news media in France and Britain reported that
hundreds of thousands of Romanian horses had suddenly entered the food
chain.
“It is total nonsense,” said Lucian Dinita, the chief of Romania’s road
police. The nation, he said, did introduce a law in 2006 restricting
horse-drawn carts on roads, but it was scrapped two years later and led
to no mass culling of unemployed horses.
Some of the horse meat that ended up in processed foods sold in France
and other countries did originate in Romania, but a French government
report issued last month said this had been clearly labeled as coming
from horses, not cows. The fraudulent substitution of horse meat for
beef — about three times the cost — occurred at a factory in southern
France, the report said.
Squeaky-clean Sweden also lapsed into finger-pointing and denial — initially, at least. When Ikea announced
near the end of last month that it was withdrawing its signature
meatballs from stores across much of Europe, the Swedish company that
manufactured them, Gunnar Dafgard AB, denied that its products contained
any horse meat and suggested that the Czech laboratory could not be
trusted. In a statement, the company said that its own tests and those
of an external laboratory had found “no horse meat,” and it added that
it had “tried to reach the laboratory in the Czech Republic for
additional information but without any success.”
Jan Bardon, Ms. Navelkova’s boss at the Czech laboratory, the State
Veterinary Institute Olomouc, whose phone number is easily found on the
Internet, said he had heard nothing from the Swedish meatball maker.
Dafgard later acknowledged that some of its products did indeed contain
horse meat as the Czechs had said. The company last week announced that
the meat probably came from Poland.
All nations in Eastern Europe except Estonia produce horse meat, but
appetites for it there are waning fast, as in the West.
“I eat it occasionally, although it is not my personal favorite and I
don’t search it out,” said Tomas Hrouda, the chief executive of
Pribramska uzenina, a Czech food company that produces horse sausages.
He said he worried that the ruckus over fraudulent labeling “sends a bad
signal to customers and casts a shadow over all meat producers.”
It has also led a growing number of European food producers and stores
to seek shelter in patriotism by assuring consumers that their meat
comes entirely from within their own country’s borders. The French
frozen-food chain Picard and the supermarkets Carrefour and Intermarché,
for example, have all said they will use only all-French beef in their
meat dishes.
Growing calls for mandatory “country of origin” labeling on all
processed meats sold in Europe have stirred concern in Brussels about a
surge in what Mr. Borg, the health and consumer affairs commissioner,
has called “veiled protectionism.” Until now, only unprocessed meat had
to identify its place of origin.
“The Germans are saying we are only going to eat German products. The
French are saying the same for French products. What happened to the
common market? This is really serious,” said Françoise Grossetête, a French member of the European Parliament.
For Jakub Sebesta, director of the Czech Agriculture and Food Inspection
Authority in Brno, the furor over doctored food products is long
overdue. “We have been living with this reality for some time. The big
problem in the 21st century is not food safety but falsification on a massive scale,” he said.
His inspection agency set up a Web site last year
called Food Pillory to name and shame producers and stores in the Czech
Republic that had been found to be selling adulterated and mislabeled
goods. In less than a year, the agency has uncovered more than 200 such
cases, including frozen fish that were in fact mostly ice and wine that
turned out to contain no grapes. “In a way it is good that the horse
meat case has uncovered what happens in the food business and that
officials in Brussels have finally woken up to this problem,” Mr.
Sebesta said. “Perhaps things will change for the better.”
The European Union’s main response so far has been to prod member states
to undertake a one-month program of random DNA testing for horse meat.
Brussels will cover 75 percent of the cost. As testing and labeling
rules become more stringent, however, the likelihood of yet more
scandals and further blows to consumer confidence only increases. “What
do we do when it turns out that hot dogs really do contain dog?” joked a
Brussels officials involved in food issues. He added, “But at least
that wouldn’t be false labeling.”
Some French fans of horse meat are hoping that the fuss could add a
frisson of excitement to eating horses and help lift the stigma from a
fare that, even in France and Belgium, is generally viewed as
old-fashioned and uncool. Several popular Paris restaurants are reported
to be interested in adding horse to their menus.
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