Poor pay a high price when it comes to cheap meat

The whole meat burger saga reveals something extremely serious – the existence of a two-tier regulatory system.

The real scandal of the burger story is not that beef has been contaminated with horse flesh. It is that the food chain is contaminated with something much more toxic – poverty.

In November 1999, I wrote a story in The Irish Times about beef that wasn’t beef. In the working class Dublin suburb of Clondalkin, people were being sold tins of something marked as “beef in juice” with a picture of a healthy-looking cow on the label.