If ‘Horse-gate’ has anything to tell us, it’s that tight margins make for cut corners.
Lessons, no doubt, will be learned.
However, as any fool knows: pay peanuts and you’ll get monkeys (maybe even to eat). An uninterrupted supply of cheap food is hardly a God-given right, or an automatic certainty. If some detective work in Ireland has dealt a mortal blow to that conceit, then the supply chain will be all the better for it.
Let’s be clear about one thing, though: the fact that substituting the meat extract from an animal more familiar with the fences at Plumpton than the cud of Ambridge is such a rare occurrence speaks volumes for the rigorous monitoring of our food chain. It’s a million miles removed from its counterparts in some less developed countries, where a hot dog is just as likely to be a realistic description as a handy euphemism.
Whilst savouring the rare luxury of packaging not being required to carry the can for some hiccough or other in the passage from farm to fork, this particular byproduct of human error does rather call into question the capability of labelling as the arbiter of good taste. (After all, if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out.)
As has been all too clearly proven, just because it says beef on the outside is no guarantee of what might be lurking within. Indeed, the only accuracy we can count on with some certainty from the information contained on a label is in the spelling rather than the telling.
On that basis, what price traffic lights, in my view the lip service of a painted smile to be taken at face value without providing any insight into the bearer’s true nature? Are they beacons of well intentioned nutritional advice or a marketing man’s superficial stab at instilling a greater degree of consumer responsibility?
Either way, by the time they’ve been qualified, quantified, tweaked and spun they’re more likely to enumerate the Pantone colour register than act as a guiding light towards an improved design for living.
Where did we lose the ability to make individual choices, to actually go shopping for products rather than being led to them by the nose? Until now, the irresistible blandishments of compelling branding have been tempered by the supposition that we’re taking considered decisions because we have the salient data at our fingertips. Know we know it ain’t necessarily so.
Efficient and well-presented packaging and labels can make our choices all the more palatable. But we can’t make choices if the packs contain a duff bill of goods. Anyone who imagines otherwise deserves to have not just the horse’s backside, but what emanates from it, served upto them in their next burger.
