Maybe the best thing about Sorting the Beef from the Bull (£16.99, out now, Bloomsbury) is that while it proves Horsegate was not an isolated incident when it comes to food fraud it was a relatively harmless one. Other scandals have been far nastier.
In 2008, 50,000 babies were hospitalised in China after the melamine powdered milk scandal. Six didn’t make it. And the dairy farmer and the milk salesman responsible were executed for their crime.
That’s just one example. And with so many similar ones, this book could read like a series of chilling chapters populated by lethal ingredients and unscrupulous villains. Yet the tone is not sensational. It’s considered, informative and comprehensively researched by Richard Evershed (“an internationally renowned analytical organic chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society”) and biologist, conservationist and scientific writer Nicola Temple (a “geek”).
They may lean heavily on puns to lighten the mood, but the pair win out by proving that food fraud is a far bigger issue than just horseburgers. It’s occurring on a well-established and voluminous scale, and early on the pair confess to feeling “overwhelmed” by the amount of research that awaited them. But, as Professor Chris Elliott points out in his foreword, for “as long as food has been prepared and sold there has been cheating”.
Nowadays, fraudsters are even making fake eggs, complete with a plaster shell that cracks just like the real thing. Maybe the very fact it’s worth the effort tells us everything we need to know.
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