Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Sorry About That Horsemeat

Dear Customers (likely of some other supermarket by now):
 We let you down. We sold you “beef” burgers with as much as thirty per cent horsemeat in them.
Sort of. As it turns out, when we looked into the situation—as we’d promised you we would—we discovered that the “horses” that provided “meat” for the “burgers” in question were not themselves all members of the animal family Equidae. Some of the horses slaughtered to provide material for the food product you might have purchased and enjoyed were in fact sawhorses. That is, wooden beams with four wooden legs often used to support another beam or a plank of wood for sawing. As it happened, those responsible—so to speak—for procuring horses to be butchered and incorporated into the more traditional beef for sale to you, our valued customers, got rather lazy. Finding it considerably easier, to say nothing of cheaper, to wrangle inanimate, stackable (!) wooden constructs, our supplier’s employees took a shortcut. And, as a result, unfortunately, you got shortchanged. Some of the horsemeat in the beefburgers sold recently in our stores might contain as much as forty per cent wood—likely (but not guaranteed to be) pine. We wish we could tell you that that’s the end of it, though. Alas! We’ve discovered that a number of horses obtained by our supplier were pommel horses, so about fifteen per cent of the horsemeat that makes up as much as thirty per cent of the beef you thought you were buying from us is gymnastics equipment. Now, here’s where it gets a little awkward. There’s no way to make this palatable, so we’re just going to come right out and tell you: some of the “horse” in the burgers is heroin. Preliminary results of an independent scientific laboratory analysis suggest that as much as three per cent of the horse in question is a highly addictive analgesic drug derived from morphine, often used illicitly as a narcotic producing euphoria. The good news is that you’re probably feeling pretty happy about this. Remember that when you speak to your solicitor. But that’s the worst of it. More or less. That’s all there is for us to reveal about the beefburgers. And getting to the bottom of just what was in those patties—and why—is all we promised to do. So we’re really going above and beyond when we tell you about the packaging. The Styrofoam under the patties? Not exactly Styrofoam. Mostly asbestos, it would seem, with trace amounts of donkey. And the U.P.C. stickers may or may not contain some zebra.
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