Meat is murder

While I waited to get my annual flu vaccination this morning, I picked up a copy of "Stern" and read an article on the follow-up to a scandal in the meat trade last year. (Hundreds of people became ill after eating condemned meat which had been intentionally mixed into produced foods.) It's happened again; it has apparently never stopped happening.

I was shocked to learn that meat can be offered for sale more than two years after the animal was slaughtered! It's not fit for human consumption, of course, and may only be used for pet food, but still: there are cold-stores around the world containing thousands of tonnes of meat that is nearly as old as your pet. All perfectly legal.

We the public are protected against these slowly rotting corpses by a little paper tag glued onto the outside of the packaging. With the tag, it's worth twenty cents a kilo. Should an unscrupulous dealer rip off that tag, it's worth three Euros a kilo.

Are you surprised to hear that there are unscrupulous dealers who rip off the tags? They mix this awful stuff in with fresh* meat, grind it all up to hamburgers and doner-kebab skewers, and sell it to us. Mm-mm good.

When the scandal broke last year, the greater public was enraged at those damned unscrupulous foreigners running the street-corner doner-kebab stands which sold the stuff, poisoning us good innocent trusting Germans; since the guilty firms were not named, nobody knew any differently. This time around, the Stern has named names and published photos. It's a very interesting list, not that the greater public will care.

The first non-purebred-German name on the list is that of the whistleblower: a Serbian truck-driver who spotted a dealer ripping off a tag and notified the police. The next non-purebred-German names are those of the victims: the end-consumers who bought the awful stuff.


* though one has to ask oneself what this word actually means.