Why does the thought of eating beefburgers adulterated with horse meat cause one’s mouth to wrinkle in disgust? Because it does wrinkle, and not just because the equine DNA entered the product inadvertently. It remains wrinkled, too, no matter how many professional gourmets tell us about the divine horse meat they enjoyed on an off-the-beaten-track Andalusian hiking tour.
For most of us, the reaction to being offered horse is the same as that of the old Glasgow friend who visited me in northern Italy in the 1990s. We went out for dinner to Cocquio-Trevisago’s finest (more or less its only) osteria. He pointed at the item asino on the menu: “What’s that?” The padrona explained by showing her teeth and braying: “Ee-aw! Ee-aw!” The donkey meat remained untroubled by our dinner order. We’re British, and we’d no more eat a horse or a donkey than we’d tuck into a dog or a cat.
Which isn’t jingoism (“Oh those ghastly horse-eating Continentals!”), but is a very good example of the Tory view of culture, which is that it’s local (to a nation) and not morally relative (against that of other nations). My cat and your dog are not available for human consumption because she is my cat and he is your dog; through centuries of living and working with cats, dogs and horses, we have gently anthropomorphised them, to the extent that it becomes irrelevant to say: “Other strains of human mammal have different national cultures where these animals are eaten.” We don’t. I don’t think my Italian friends are inferior to me, but neither are they (culturally) better. They’re Italian, so they eat donkey. I’m British, so I don’t. That in extremis this arbitrary protection breaks down is neither here nor there: so does the taboo over human flesh.
I’m ignoring the other correct response to the adulterated burgers: angry shock, that very cheap food is filled with mechanically reconstituted rubbish. Perhaps some good will come from that shock; maybe more people will eat proper meat, or stop eating it altogether.
I won’t hold my breath. I’m vegetarian, which I recognise is almost as against the grain of British culinary culture as the consumption of horse. You’re not all about to throw away your beefburgers, no matter how grotty their content, and join me in the cruelty-free smug-fest glory of soya and quinoa.
In any case, the shock about the nutritionally poor content of cheap food is just part of the class narrative of the country: middle-class people can’t understand why the poor would prefer to pay a pound for a tray of plastic-wrapped meaty rubbish than the same amount of money for a bowl of fruit or vegetables from their local street market. The poverty in question is that of time, and hope. What’s the point of spending an hour making dinner, if your life is grim and its prospects restricted? Two nations.
But we become one nation in our collective gut reaction to the adulterated burgers, at the idea of eating Dobbin. This explains two other animal-related stories in the news; one small, gentle and sad, the other large and angry.
The small, gentle story was the death of Alan, a dog who lived at Tatler magazine HQ. He was killed by a revolving door (demonstrating that the fear I have on approaching those devices is not entirely irrational. A curse on all of you who think it funny to push as hard as you can, in the hope of unbalancing he who follows behind). We all worry endlessly about the animals in our care, and saw those fears realised in Alan’s demise. It no more diminishes that sadness to say, “There are some countries where they eat dogs, you know,” than it would help Tesco make a similar point about their unexpectedly horsey burgers: Alan exemplifies the point that culture is local.
The angry, large story concerns the RSPCA’s prosecution of fox hunts, and – I think – the confusion the unpopularity of this is causing the charity’s politicised leadership. We’re a nation of animal lovers. Why are we so angry with the RSPCA?
It’s no accident that the RSPCA is led by a Liberal Democrat supporter. Liberals are fixated on the relationship between the individual and the state, to the extent that they’re blind to the medium in which both individuals and their government exist and operate: national culture. The RSPCA’s mistake is to suppose that the animal-loving nature which funds the charity’s existence translates to a willingness to turn our backs on the culture that is the crucible for that love of animals in the first place.
If British society were a building – something magnificent, like a cathedral – then its culture would be represented in that cathedral’s stained glass windows. Those windows would have images of the horse, both pulling a plough and in pursuit of the fox; the dog, guarding the front door; the cat, symbol of domestic peace. They would not show a family sitting down to a hearty meal of horse carcass.