Human Wrongs Watch
By Lasse Bruun*, Greenpeace – Over the past couple of weeks the ‘horsemeat scandal’ has topped news headlines, revolted consumers and forced retailers and producers to come clean and revise their supply chains.
This is firstly a story of mislabelling, but mostly another insight into the untrustworthy and opaque food industry that is trying to cater to an ever growing appetite for cheap and abundant meat.
The scandal has once again put the spotlight on a broken food system geared to feed luxury food (meat) to already overfed people in the global North, while disregarding the environmental, biodiversity and socioeconomic problems associated with the livestock industry, let alone the dietary needs of the global South.
Today, the global North – countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and Europe – are eating far too much meat and the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are rapidly catching up, fuelled by the aspirational status eating meat projects.