Week 8 2013

Tendring Topics....on Line

'Horses for Courses' - but preferably not on the menu!

          The current scandal about horse meat having been substituted for beef in meat products on sale in a number of Britain’s supermarkets took me back in memory to the days, half a century ago, when I was employed as a Public Health Inspector and food inspector by the then Clacton Urban District Council.

                         Perhaps this photo isn't quite fair to Tesco. They were neither the first nor the worst.           

 Our main concern in the realm of food inspection was the prevention of food poisoning or food-borne infectious diseases.  We carried out post mortem inspections of food animals, particularly cattle and pigs, at local slaughter houses (a job highly likely to turn omnivores into vegetarians!) inspected food shops and their wares, and when considered necessary, took samples of food items intended for sale, for chemical or bacteriological examination.

            We also engaged in work which nowadays, I think, would be that of the Consumer Protection Officer.  We inspected food offered or intended for sale to make sure that it was what it was declared to be;  that customers were buying food ‘of the nature, quality or substance’ that the retailer claimed.  In the pre-war and immediate post-war years many foods were sold ‘loose’, not pre-packed as most are today and there was much more scope for an unscrupulous retailer to, for instance, water down milk, substitute margarine for butter, adulterate sugar or flour and make ‘pork’ sausages with minced beef and an excessive amount of breadcrumb filler.

            DNA was, of course, unheard of in those days and identification much more basic.  I think it would have been perfectly possible for processed horseflesh to have been substituted for beef.  However there was then little if any demand for mass produced processed meat.  Butchers made their own pork or beef sausages, brawn and other meat products to supply their own customers. I doubt if there was any widespread fraud on the scale that there appears to be today.

           

            In any event it was the retailers who were held to be responsible for the food they sold and for its labelling.   Retailers had to suffer any penalty when claims that they had made for the food they sold proved to be fraudulent.  This surely should be the position today. In the ‘60s and earlier this could occasionally result in a perceived injustice where a small retailer had been deceived by a smooth-tongued salesman. This isn’t the case today.  Those retailers involved in the horse meat scandal are giant supermarkets who could have, had they wished, taken regular samples of the products of their suppliers and had them analysed in commercial laboratory*.

            All of the above is, of course, assuming that the law today is much the same as it was back in the 1960s and before.  It is quite possible that sometime between Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, it has been decided that the consumer protection laws to which I have referred have been scrapped as being ‘Fuddy-duddy red tape, probably dreamed up by some bureaucrat in Brussels, that stifles enterprise, initiative and profit-making’

*  It seemed for a while that the horsemeat scandal was going to provide yet another stick with which the Europhobes could strike Europe and the EU.  ‘It’s those depraved foreigners across the Channel who eat horse meat.  It’s all part of a plot hatched in Brussels.  Ban all imports of meat from the EU.  That’ll be tit for tat for when they banned our meat exports because of mad cow disease!’   It must have come as quite a blow when British slaughter-houses and meat processing plant became involved.

‘It’s not winning that’s important…..

          …….It’s taking part’.   That was once the British attitude to sport.  I remember, perhaps twenty years ago, reading an article in which the author wrote rather  scornfully of American and Soviet athletes who were interested only in winning medals and trophies – so unlike we Brits who ran, jumped, swam and engaged in competitive games for the pleasure of the activity itself, not in the hope of winning.   Edwardian poet Sir Henry Newbolt summed it up in a few lines of his poem Vitai Lampada:

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, 

Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, 

But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote 

"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

             All of that seems to have changed.  Britain’s athletes did very well indeed in last year’s London Olympics.  They gained international acclaim and a crop of medals – gold, silver and bronze in many, but not all, of the sporting competitions.  It might have been thought that for the next Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, extra effort and extra funding would have been put into those sports at which we had done rather less well, in an effort to encourage and perhaps raise the standard of those competitors.

            Not a bit of it – forget all that stuff about it being the taking part that is important.  Britain wants more gold medals. Extra official funding has gone to the sports at which we have done well, in the hope that next time our competitors will do just as well, or even better. Tough luck on the 'also rans'.  We’re backing known winners, not potential losers.  

            IT seems that we’re just as obsessed with medals and trophies as ‘those Yanks’ or ‘those Ruskies’

 ‘Making the Sick Sicker!’

          This was the headline under which, a fortnight ago, I wrote in this blog about the activities of Atos  the private firm who were assessing the work potential of those who were claiming Disability Living Allowance – and the way in which false assessments were making genuinely disabled people ill and even resulting in suicides. Here’s what I wrote:

Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

          Way back in the 1950s, when I first began freelance writing, I was told that a picture can often make a point more tellingly than a thousand words. I have often wished that I had the sketching skills to illustrate the thoughts that I have expressed in words. A Quaker friend of mine has demonstrated the truth of that with a cartoon copied from another Facebook page.   Here it is. It makes its point much more effectively than my words could hope to and was well worth passing on. Many thanks!

When did it happen!

            I was listening to a discussion on the tv.  The government had decided to make child-care services more easily available by increasing the maximum number of under-fives with whom a carer  is permitted to cope.  It would be OK, a government spokesperson insisted, because they would have to be better qualified child-carers.  They would, for instance, be required have good GCSEs in English and Maths.

            Well, I can see that a child carer ought not to be illiterate – even if it is only so as to be able to read the instructions on any equipment that is used or on any medication that may have to be dispensed.  And the carer ought obviously to be capable of counting all of his or her charges, to make sure none is missing.  I don’t really see though how literacy and numeracy would make the carer better able to deal with a four year old bully, three year old tantrums or a two-year old showing symptoms that could be – just could be – those of meningitis.

            And then it struck me how totally unreal (and how sinister!) this discussion would have sounded during at least the first thirty years of my life.  Then it had been taken for granted that the best person to care for a young child was his or her mother. Professionally trained Health Visitors visited and advised young mums on bringing up  their children safely and in what was then considered to be the best practice.  Not even George Orwell in his 1984 had anticipated children being cared for by anyone other than their mothers during the first few years of their lives.

            There were professional child-carers of course.  They worked in orphanages and children’s homes where unfortunate children who had no parents, or whose parents were incapable of caring for them, were brought up.   We all pitied such children and put our hands in our pockets to give them what support we could.

In those days responsible young men didn’t get married and have children (in that order of course!)  until their income was sufficient to support a wife and family.  Before giving their consent Victorian and Edwardian fathers are said to have asked prospective sons-in-law, ‘Are you in a position to support my daughter in the manner to which she has become accustomed?’ My future father-in-law certainly didn’t put it like that (nor would he have had a final veto!) but I am sure that he and my future wife's mother did give some thought to my ‘prospects’ before they gave us their blessing.

            Nowadays – although everyone is much better off than we were then – it is taken for granted that a couple can’t hope to live together in comfort, never mind have children, on just one income.  Both must be in full-time work and must share the tasks of home-making.  There will inevitably need to be provision for maternity leave but the young mother is expected to get back to the office desk, or the supermarket check-out or whatever, the moment  child care can be arranged.

            The results are plain to see – casual promiscuous sex, broken marriages and other relationships, under-age mums, an increasing number of abortions, juvenile crime.  The future seemed so full of hope and promise in those first few years after World War II.  Where and when did it all go so wrong?