Claire Smith: A wake-up call about where all our food comes from

SOMEONE, somewhere, fed a horse into a mincer. Someone, somewhere put the horsemeat into a plastic bag and stuck on a label saying Beef. And lots and lots of us ate it.

There’s been a lot of talk about criminal gangs, about fraud. There’ve been photographs in the papers of shifty-looking Irish horse traders and dodgy Romanian abbatoirs.

This week the supermarkets are frantically testing hundreds of products looking for horse DNA. Apparently they didn’t previously carry out tests looking for horse DNA because they didn’t know it was there. Perhaps they should carry out tests for badger DNA, hedgehog DNA and monkey DNA just in case. Who knows what else could be bulking up all those pies we’ve been eating.

Meanwhile, the supermarket spokespeople are whimpering: “We were victims too.”

Protest as they might, we all know the growth and the buying power of the supermarkets has a huge part to play in the whole sorry saga.

Buying our weekly groceries from vast, chilled shiny warehouses full of things in packets has made zombie consumers of us all.

Our food is too cheap, our food is too readily available. We have become disconnected from what we eat. And we don’t think enough about where our food is coming from.

This week 45 per cent of shoppers said they would avoid buying meat from supermarkets caught up in the horsemeat scandal. And speciality butchers are skipping for joy about the surge in demand for their products.

But when the dust settles and the supermarkets declare themselves a horse- free zone will anything be different ?

Will we become a nation of Jamie Olivers overnight? I doubt it. Supermarkets are too easy. We are already in too deep.

As long as we are persuaded we are not chewing a slice of Shergar or a chunk of Muffin the Mule I predict very few of us will change our habits at all.

Until the next time.