Ahhh!..Bisto!
It’s facinating how faith in British institutions is collapsing. One by one, like a row of dominos, British institutions are revealing themselves to be greedy, amoral and corrupt. The bankers of course (we all hate the bankers), the politicians fiddling their expenses, the press tapping our phones and the police forging documents and making false statements.
Now it is the turn of the food companies to demonstrate their complacency and disregard for their core business as #horsegate dominates the twittersphere. First a little horse DNA was found in beef burgers, then one type of burger at Tesco was found to consist of 29% horse meat and now Findus beef lasagne has been found to be 100% horse meat.
The cause is said to be an overcomplicated supply chain. In corporate Britain, the farmer and the supermarket are linked by a plethora of abattoirs trading companies, agents and futures dealers. It’s so complicated that the retailers don’t know what they’re selling. So who’s to blame?
The last I heard the politician were passing the buck to shady criminal gangs in eastern Europe. Hmmm….could be. It’s possible that foreign criminals are a link in the supply chain but that’s a cop out. The real question is why, supposedly legitimate, British food companies are dealing with foreign criminals?
The real blame for #horsegate lies firmly with the brands.
In the idiot world of the 21st century, retail sales are dominated by marketing and the key to marketing is branding. The brands seek to control their public image. BMW tell us that their cars are reliable, powerful and technically sophisticated, Louis Vuiton tells us they make nice bags and the major food brands tell us that their food is quick, delicious and nutritious. The goal of their marketing is to gain our trust – and they succeed, we trust them. We trust the food brands to ensure that the products which we buy are as described. We trust that we will get an fair deal. Obviously their marketing has been projecting a false image.
It’s mind boggling! Did the people who make the lasagne not notice that this was not beef? Are they so ignorant of food and so bereft of cooking skills that they can’t tell horse from beef? If they can’t even put the right animal into their food products then this calls into question the quality control of their entire operation. If the meat is horse rather than beef, can we trust that the milk is being pasteurised or that free range eggs are not from caged birds?
Wikipedia states: “Brand is the personality that identifies a product, service or company…and how it relates to key constituencies: customers, staff, partners, investors etc”. It is the brands with which the public have the relationship and it is the brands which we trust. The creation of trust might be said to be the raison d’etre of a brand. If the brands now pass the blame to their suppliers then their brand names becomes worthless. If Tesco don’t know what is in their products then we may as well buy any old burgers.
In an overly commercialised world this scandal may be an unwelcome but useful wake up call. In the short term the high street butchers will gain from #horsegate but it is the responsibility of the major food brands to get their supply chains under control. They should spend more time on intrinsic quality and less on marketing.
St Malo Beach
Art Photography
The cost of efficiency 1 – Our food turns to crap
Tags: Ammonia, corporations, efficiency, fast food, globalisation, Jammie Oliver, junk food, outsourcing, Pink Slime
Nutrition: That's not ice cream... that's 'pink slime'
Efficiency savings. Every time a new government gets in they claim they will make efficiency savings. One of my first jobs was as a computer operator. In those days computer time was so expensive that work would be “batched up” and done in a big chunk. One guy said to me that we are the slowest things in the computer room and he meant that if a batch job stopped and needed another tape loaded then we needed to change it immediately.
I was young and I got into this efficiency stuff. I worked to maximise the time that the computer was doing work. Since then I have noticed efficiency is a driving force behind capitalism. The way it’s sold is that efficiency will mean we get quicker service, that our products and services will be cheaper and so overall our lives wil be better.
I have started to question this.
It seems to me that efficiency these days is a way to squeeze more profits from a process or organisation. Computers have been introduced everywhere and most organisations now provide a web interface for front ending their services. The idea is that we as “consumers” will be given a better service but often this is not the case.
Take the sale of car insurance for example. In the old days you would meet with some salesman in an office and he would ask you a few questions and get you to fill out a form and hand him a cheque. That would be it. The salesman would have done much of the work. In my case he would have realised that I was over 21 and so not asked me this idiotic question. He would have noticed my gender. He would see that I did not have a wooden leg. etc etc.
A corporate fashion of recent years has been outsourcing and this is usually taken to mean a company getting it’s non-core work done by a third party company. However, in the case of many interactions with consumers, companies are outsourcing work to you. In the case of car insurance we are forced to wade through endless pages of forms and tick boxes on the web. Am I over 18? Am I male? Have I ever been involved in an accident? Did I claim? How much did I claim? Along with this outsourcing, computerisation has meant that is easy for the corporations to throw in extra questions. The risk department will be telling the software designers to ask more and more questions and as the time wasted is not their own they just throw them in.
What race am I? What is my previous address? What is my national insurance number? We are forced to answer hundreds of impertinent questions and then, when we’re done, we are forced to read their bloody agreement. Pages and pages of clauses and caveats that get the company out of paying claims.
We are doing their work for them.
The end result is that all this efficiencies has worked in favour of the organisation but not in the favour of the consumer. Service may be cheaper but they are also crapper.
More and more our society has been reduced to two actors: The global corporation and the individual and this relationship is decidedly unequal. When did you last play any part in creating the contract which you signed for a service? You probably never have. The corporation creates the contract and presents it to you. You either sign it or they refuse to do business with you.
Efficiency means squeezing more people onto aeroplanes so that many of the seats don’t tilt back. Efficiency means cramming more and more homes into smaller and smaller areas of land so that interior walls are now made of chipboard. Efficiency means there is never any slack in the system. Efficiency means that when you call the bank they read from a menu and are incapable of dealing with non-standard requests. Efficiency means that when you go to buy petrol, the few seconds that you have to chat with the guy behind the counter is taken up by him asking if you would like two fucking chocolate bars for the price of one and you drearily replying no. Efficiency means we drink out of paper cups and the food in Indian restaurants consists of microwaves meat covered in bulk order sauce.
The picture at the top of this article is of a product known as Pink Slime. It’s seems that, in an effort to squeeze even more value out of the consumer , American food “manufacturers” have taken to collecting the offal that is normally thrown to animals after a cow has been slaughtered, mixing it up with a lot of chemicals (including Ammonia), sticking it in a spin dryer and then putting it into hamburgers and feeding it to Americans.
Bollocks to efficiency!
hove station
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