Food Scandals

The great stir about BSE-contaminated British beef has not calmed down yet, when in the last weeks news about dioxinated poultry and eggs from Belgium have reached us.

The team „“Food Scandals“ tried to find out something about the background.

What are dioxins ? Dioxins do not occur in nature. They are an unintentional by-product of burning processes as well as of the production of wood preservatives and PVC.

When the dioxins get via food chain into the human body they harm the liver and may cause cancer.

Why are these problems increasing in the recent years ?

1. Large concerns get the highest subventions, the industrialization of agriculture is extended. Happy cows get rarer and rarer just as free-ranging chickens do, since batteries are more efficient.

2. Dioxin-analysis is expensive and lengthy. They last more than four weeks and cost more than thousand DM.

3. Since our food should be relatively cheap, the animals are ruthlessly fattened. The food consists of cereals, wholemeal soya, animal feed, vitamins and minerals. The proportionate fat is up to 3%.

Within the period of a month, the fattening units turn 40g light chicks into chickens to grill weighing three pounds - a 3600% increase in weight. If a human baby of seven pounds birth weight put on weight at the same speed, it would weigh about 130 kilograms after one month.

Nowadays a battery hen lays about 300 eggs a year, fifty years ago they were not more than 120 eggs. The pig uses the whey, rest milk and the remains of those who died of swine fever.

Experts think that this development could only be stopped if the consumers were willing to buy more expensive products. But they aren’t. In surveys they attach much importance to health and quality, they refuse batteries as well as animal transports all through Europe lasting for days. At the supermarket, however, they take the cheap imported meat and eggs from battery hens.

The cause for such a behaviour lies in a shift of values : Holidays, spare time and cars are nowadays more important than a healthy diet.

Moreover, we have a further dilemma : If we take highly nutritious and quite safe raw materials like potatoes or maize, the animals are food competitors to the human. Everything that is eaten by the animal is taken away from the human diet and intensifies the worldwide hunger problem. On the other hand, if we feed the animals with everything that is no longer right to human consumption, we increase the available food but we get problems with disease causing agents and remains.

The dioxin scandal will not be the last in the agrarian society. The dead chicks of a Belgian chicken baron have been used to make animal feed again. The droppings of the Belgian chickens have probably long since been turned into a fertilizer and lie on the starwberry fields now. That is, the dioxin is now in the strawberries. The main thing is it tastes nice !?

Dear GLOBE-students in the project “The main thing is it tastes nice”.

Do you also have such discussions in your country? How does the government react? How much importance do you in your country attach to food? Would you spend more money for it? What would in your opinion, be a solution to the dilemma described in the text?