Originally from: coleen
                        
Taken from the Guardian Archive
Coleen

So ingrained has the concept of cheap food become that it seems impossible now to eradicate it from the political process, institutional planning and the public mind. Yet no one seems to stop to count the true cost of 'cheap food'.

For a number of years the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has been following a covert policy of closing down 'red meat' abattoirs. The theory was that there were too many of them to be viable – and it was true that many of them were badly run.

Under the guise of implementing EU regulations, MAFF set about closing the smaller ones, and centralising the slaughter of animals in large units. The logic behind this had little to do with the EU – it would have been easy to bring the smaller abattoirs up to standard over a reasonable period – and much to do with economies of scale.

Never mind that animals would become more stressed because they would have to travel greater distances to be slaughtered. Never mind the greater chances of infectivity in the case of an outbreak of disease. The costs of slaughter would be reduced. Meat would be cheaper. The public would be appeased.

So, between 1985 and 2000, the number of abattoirs fell from 1,022 to 387. Over the same period, the average number of animals killed each week has risen from 13,313 per abattoir to 32,729. The consequences of this policy have been made evident by the course of the latest outbreak of foot-and-mouth. When the first case was identified, the focus of investigation fell on Cheale Meats in Little Warley, Essex. It has since been established that more than 600 farms, from as far away as Northumberland, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and Scotland, send their meat there.