There are striking similarities between the horse-burger affair and the international banking scandal that broke in August 2007. The financial crash was caused the sale of toxic financial products called Collateral Debt Obligations that were composed of mortgage bonds that had been "sliced and diced" into new products that were then marketed as cheap and safe. They were the financial equivalent of mince meat, which of course was itself invented as a means of disguising poor quality meat.
In theory CDOs spread the risk and diminished the likelihood of a price crash, because the dodgy mortgages were bolstered by the sound ones. So, for every "liar loan" handed to an unemployed single parent in Detroit, there was supposed to be a solid and dependable loan on a substantial sandstone property in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way - the duff mortgages ended up contaminating the good ones and the whole system perished. These financial products had been sliced and diced so often and had been swapped back and forth between the offshore subsidiaries of international banks that no one knew any more what was in them.
The issue was one of trust - the most essential commodity in any financial system, or indeed, in any food chain. When you examine the extraordinary circuitous route by which processed meat is marketed, it is hardly surprising that it becomes contaminated. Findus ready meals were found to have horse meat that came from Romanian slaughterhouses, via a Dutch food trader, who sold the stuff to a Cypriot dealer who sold it on to a French firm, Comigel, that sold it to some of it to the Netherlands, and some to UK supermarkets, which ended up being tested in Ireland. Once a product has been passed through half a dozen intermediaries, it is impossible to know where it is headed or what the hell is in it. We know that horse meat ended up in cottage pies sold to children in England. The Scottish government insists that no horse has been flogged - if you'll excuse the inevitable pun - to Scottish schools, but who really knows?
