After the hor has been bolted 挂牛头卖马肉
Food safety
食品安全
After the hor has been bolted
挂牛头卖马肉
Hor meat in the food chain is a wake-up call, not a calamity
“马肉风波”算不上是灾难性的事件，而是给食品链敲响一次警钟。
TITUS ANDRONICUS avenged himlf on the barbarian queen Tamora by murdering her sons and rving them up to her in a pie. European food manufacturers did nothing so dreadful when they sold hor as beef in burgers and lasagne. Hormeat is not dangerous. Italian gourmets adore thin slices of prosciutto di cavallo. The Chine chomp half a million tonnes of horflesh a year. But if a product says “beef” on the label, it should be that.
泰特斯•安德洛克尼斯为报一己之仇，杀死了野蛮女王塔摩拉的儿子，并骗她吃了用其子做的人肉馅饼。欧洲食品商只是以马肉冒充牛肉添加到汉堡或者冷冻面中，并没有做出任何像泰特斯那样卑劣的事情。而且，马肉也是肉。意大利美食家对马肉火腿情有独钟。中国餐桌上每年要吃下50万吨马肉。但是如果原材料标签上却明目张胆写着“牛肉”，事情就变得复杂了。
电视机安装Some big names are now deeply embarrasd. Tesco, a British supermarket, Aldi, a German discounter, and Findus, a frozen-food manufacturer, all inadvertently sold the fraudulent flesh. It may have reached more than a dozen countries. Sellers withdrew the offending products and grovelled. Politicians fulminated. More test results are expected soon. (Update: On February 14th Britain's Food Standards Agency said that eight hors slaughtered in the country tested positive for the painkiller bute and six of them may have entered the food chain in France.)
玻璃树
许多响当当的品牌如今陷入进退两难的困境：英国超市特易购Tesco，德国折
扣店阿尔迪Aldi，还有冷冻食品制造商芬达斯Findus都不经意间卷入“马肉风波”的欺诈案中。“马肉风波”估计影响了十几个国家。卖家召回存在质量问题的生肉并且表示歉意。政客们则在一旁破口大骂。更详细的检验结果很快就会公
保定满城布。（实时数据：2月14日，英国食品标准局表示法国一家屠宰场受检的八只马体内马用止痛药药检
呈阳性，其中六只已流入其市场。）
That hors have strayed into the food chain does not show that the fencing has collapd. Food is vastly safer than it was a century ago, when food poisoning was a statistically significant cau of death (e chart). Rules tighten with each scare. After a deadly outbreak of a human version of mad-cow dia, caught from eating British beef in the 1990s, farmers had to give cows passports showing where they came from and where they had been. (Hors have passports, too, though the scheme is somewhat laxer.)
马肉溜入市场并不代表食品检测线崩溃。现在的食品要比一个世纪前安全一百倍，统计显示当时食物中毒是导致人类死亡的主要原因。每一次惊恐过后，法规条款就会更加明细。20世纪90年代食用牛肉造成疯牛病在人类中间流窜开并且引发灾难性后果，自此之后农场主就必须给每头牛贴上标签，标明这头牛的详细出身。（当然马也有如此标签，尽管不像牛肉那样严格）
Big retailers and producers have brands to protect, so they are vigilant. When fraudsters are found to have diluted a pricey fruit juice with a cheaper one, or switched Basmati for ordinary rice, it is sometimes becau a supermarket has spotted something wrong. An audit by Tesco of its suppliers “is one of the most feared and respected things in the industry,” says Michael Walker, a food-safety consultant. “How come it didn’t pick this up?”
大型零售商和生产商要保护自己的品牌形象，所以他们时刻会保持警惕性。诈
骗犯稀释昂贵果汁以次充好或者用普通大米代替巴斯马蒂香稻，有时发现这种情况是因为超市察觉道哪里出了问题。“特易购对其供应商的审计流程算得上是业内令人尊敬又畏惧的事情，”食品安全顾问迈克尔•沃克说。“但是这次怎么就没及时发现呢？”
罚款通知单范本Tesco’s answer is that in one ca its supplier of frozen burgers disregarded a list of approved suppliers and its stipulation that the meat come from Britain or Ireland. But such mishaps have deeper caus.
特易购针对其中一个案例给出的答案是：冷冻汉堡的供应商无视名单上合格的次级供应商，而且特特易购明文规定肉源必须是英国或者爱尔兰。不过，发生这样的事故，原因远不止如此简单。
Though prices of raw materials are going up, penny-pinching consumers refu to pay more for ready-meals. Retailers, equally unwilling to forgo profits, are putting relentless pressure on suppliers to cut costs. They in turn are frantically rejigging foodstuffs to be cheaper. “De-sinewed meat” (scraps mechanically parated from the carcass) emed a fitting ingredient for low-priced British hamburgers until last April. But then the European Commission banned most types of it. Patty makers may have looked abroad for an alternative.男人养精的食物
尽管原材料价格不断上涨，但是锱铢必较的顾客仍不愿去买半成品或成品。零售商同样不愿放弃挣钱的机会，一直压榨供应商以降低成本价格。反之，为降低售价供应商疯狂偷工减料。直到去年4月，“剔除了腱子的肥膘块”（机器剥离后的边角料）作为英国低价汉堡的原材料似乎再合适不过了。但是之后欧盟委员会取缔了大多数类似的肉种。馅饼主估计又得去海外寻找机会了。
The mislabelled-mince saga reveals “just how convoluted” the supply chain can be, says Bryan Roberts of Kantar Retail, a consultancy. The ground-up hor that found its way into the own-label lasagne of Findus and Aldi was apparently slaughtered in Romania. Two intermediaries arranged its shipment to a French processor, Spanghero, which nt it to a factory in Luxembourg owned by Comigel, also French. “The more complex the food chain, the more difficult it is to control,” says Mark Woolfe, a former head of food authenticity at Britain’s Food Standards Agency.
贴错标签的传奇事迹揭示了“食品供应链是怎样让人发狂的”咨询顾问公司Kantar Retail的布莱恩•罗伯茨说。由罗马尼亚加工碾碎的马肉流入芬达斯和阿尔迪这样拥有自主千层面品牌的公司。随后两家公司安排送往法国一家加工公司，再流转到同样是法国一家公司Comigel在卢森堡建的加工厂。“食品链越是
复杂，管理起来也越艰难。”马克•沃尔菲说，前英国食品安全标准局食品真伪鉴定中心主任。
This bedevils every industry with stretched-out supply lines. Walmart, an American retailing giant, had no idea that garment suppliers had subcontracted orders to a sweatshop in Bangladesh until it burned down, with conquences more awful than the queasiness felt by unwitting consumers of hormeat. A recent survey by PwC, a consultancy, found that retail and consumer-goods companies were less likely than other industrie s to e their supply chains as having “strategic” importance, treating them instead as ways to save money. The footloo relationships that food companies often have with suppliers can spring nasty surpris.
每家拥有纵深供应线的工厂都因此苦恼不已。美国零售巨头沃尔玛对于服装供应商将合同转包于孟加拉一家工作条件差工资低廉的工厂也是一筹莫展，最终发现还是因为孟加拉工厂发火生灾，后果当比不知情的消费者最后发现是马肉而恶心反胃严重得多。普华永道PwC顾问公司近期发表一篇调查研究报告，其中发现零售商和消费品公司不像其他产业对于自己的供货来源把关上有“战略”层面的特殊意义，而是作为其削减成本的渠道之一。食品公司这种自由散漫的贸易关系最终结果只能是“有惊无喜”。
Even before the hormeat hoo-ha, there were rumbles of change. A report by Rabobank, a Dutch bank, urges food companies to move away from fleeting relationships with independent-minded suppliers and towards “dedicated” supply chains bad on long contracts and clo collaboration. W
almart’s IPL and Tesco’s Group Food Sourcing, which bypass middlemen and buy directly from producers, may be steps in that direction.
即使在“马肉风波”之前，也不乏有一些变革出现。荷兰合作银行在报告中强烈要求食品公司终止与那些独立操作的供应商短期合作，而是转向立足于长期合同“精细的”供应链继而密切合作。沃尔玛IPL和特易购食品采购部门撇开中间商直接和生产者建立买卖关系，这或许就是前进的风向标。
党性修养方面
建筑层高Hors for cours
“马”老师好！
Retailers say auditors cannot be expected to catch the sort of fraud that may have let hormeat into the burger chain. The emphasis may well shift towards testing, both by agencies and by the industry. Food is already checked for pesticides, microbes, hea vy metals and drugs. One reason horburgers were not caught earlier is that a panic
about hormeat in salami in 2003 turned out to be an expensive fal alarm. Now testers will no doubt screen for the entire manifest of Noah’s ark.
零售商表示不应该指望审计人员能够跟的上类似马肉流入汉堡加工链这样的欺诈案脚步。重点应该放
在检测上面，无论是当局检测还是工厂自己检测。食品已经经过农药、微生物、重金属和药物检测流程。那为什么早先没有检测出马肉成分？原因其中之一可能是因为2003年萨拉米马肉恐慌事件到头来只是拉响一次昂贵不堪的警报。如今检测人员绝不会放过诺亚方舟上一丝一毫的疑点。
Mr Roberts hopes that retailers will ea up in their unyielding quest for lower costs. However, that would require shoppers, too, to care less about prices. Good luck with that.
套中人作者罗伯特希望零售商不要再下放削减成本的死任务。同样适用于普通店家，不要过分关心价格。希望今后以此为戒，“马肉风波”不再重演。
