horse burgers

I've been taking quite an interest in the horse meat in burgers thing.

Not because it in any sense worries me, but because I've found the behaviour of the media really fascinating - and not in a good way.

I'm sufficiently old to remember a significant number of these health scares.  One of the first I remember was Salmonella in eggs, but there's been things like BSE too.  Now some of the (BSE) are genuinely of significant concern, but others (Salmonella and this horse meat one) are not far beyond a whole heap of fuss over nothing.

In this case I really think the media has taken things too far - they seem absolutely determined to whip everything up in a massive storm when it's really not that big of a deal.  Yes, fraud has been committed and it's not ideal.  Yes it does say a lot about our eating habits that aren't necessarily good.  But there is no danger to human health from eating horsemeat.

Indeed, horse meat is actually quite good for you, it's just that culturally, for whatever reason, we have not traditionally eaten it in the UK.  In France, and I'm sure many other places, they do.  It is an edible meat.

But if you take the media's reaction on face value you'd think this was some Soylent Green esque nightmare where they're grinding up small babies and spoon-feeding them to invalids and the poor.

What I found particularly galling was the way they desperately hunted around for anything that might make it a health issue.  They eventually found one of course - a drug called "Bute" is given to horses but is now banned for humans.  This was apparently found in some of the horse carcasses, but the doses were so low you'd have had to eaten nothing but horse meat from now until the middle of next year to even get close to a human-scale dose.

And even then there are only some vague risks of side effects - this isn't some cyanide-like killer drug, it's just something some people get a side-effect from.

The whole thing is just ridiculously over-blown and the media does itself no favours when it behaves like this.

I have a bit of a theory about this sort of thing.  It's actually closely related to the whole "gate" thing the media does.  The Watergate scandal was the high-water mark for journalists.  It's the one thing they can point to as something that never would have been known about if it wasn't for journalists.  But now every journalist thinks that therefore legitimises them - it's why they stick the non-sensical "gate" at the end of stuff: "Look," they're saying.  "This is us being all amazing again." even though it's normally nothing of the sort.