Something's rotten in the state of Bavaria
The sausage meat that had been exported but rejected as unfit was returned and recycled, "dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for human consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had trampled and spit… A man could run his hand over these pile of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put out poisoned bread for them; they would die, and the rats, bread and meat would to into the hoppers together." The Jungle, Upton Sinclair.
This year marks the centenary of the publication of what may be, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin, the most important didactic novel in US history. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair exposed what went on in the Chicago stockyards, where animals were slaughtered and meat was packed in conditions that were not only hideous for man and beast but criminally unsanitary.
The US president in 1906 was Teddy Roosevelt and he had seen American soldiers die during the Spanish-American War after eating rotten meat. A reading of The Jungle spurred him into signing into law the Pure Food and Drug Act, and every advanced country since then has enacted similar legislation.
Which brings us to Bavaria, where rotten meat abounds. For the past three weeks, the state's health authorities have been raiding meat factories and confiscating their putrid contents, some of which was four years out of date. The police have been pointing the finger at a "doner kebab mafia" supplying stands with skewers of rotten meat, but Clarsonimus at the Blogger Network has an interesting angle on the scandal. The consumers are the culprits! Why? Because…
"Germans demand dirt-cheap prices. You know, the cheaper the better. At the same time they expect the highest quality products available, of course. In a perfect world this would be possible. Know what I'm sayin'? And that's why you can't walk a hundred meters in a German city without running into one of their notorious discount supermarkets offering 'fresh' meat at prices unheard of in other countries."
There is a lot of truth in this, but Clarsonimus errs in saying that these prices and this particular discounting strategy is unknown in others countries. One has only to look at the international success of German discounters such as Aldi, Lidl and Metro to see that consumers all over the world are voting for the concept with their purses and wallets. Guten Appetit!
