Unintended Consequences

As you are well aware, Dear Reader, everything in Britain is now made of horse. It’s interesting to note that whereas in English most animals have one word for the living animal and one for its meat (cow: beef, pig: pork, sheep: mutton) horses do not. It’s interesting but it doesn't really have to do with what I'm going to talk about today which are unintended consequences.

I've always enjoyed this sort of thing, where someone makes a choice which ends up affecting something which is apparently entirely unrelated. It’s a thing that always seems to have fascinated people, just think of how many books and plays and movies that you have read and seen featured unintended consequences as a plot point. It’s a whole bunch I bet. But the current horse crisis is a prime example, because did you know that the 100% horse lasagne can be traced all the way back to Romanian traffic regulations?

No seriously.

Imagine if you will that you are the Romanian transport minister circa 2006. In a few months your country is finally going to join the EU, a move that will (everyone hopes) be the final stage of Romania’s transition from post-communist rural backwater to a fully fledged member of the world mainstream. All your fellow ministers are coming up with great new ideas on how to show that your country is modern and vibrant but you are stumped. What can you do?

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And then one day on your way to work you end up stuck in yet another traffic jam, caused by a farmer moving some bales of hay on his horse drawn cart and it hits you. No one in Brussels is riding around on horse carts and buggies! You need to get the horses off the road and get Romanians into the 21^st century and driving cars!

And that’s (sort of) what actually happened. Up until joining the EU the Romanian countryside was relatively chokka with horse drawn transport, but in order to bring the country up to European standards they were banned from using most roads. It probably meant less traffic jams, but it also meant that suddenly thousands of horses were unemployed. What were the farmers to do?

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Well of course as new members of the EU those Romanian farmers had access to a huge common market and pretty soon they were selling them on to dodgy horse dealers who would trot them into trucks, drive them to mafia abattoirs in Poland and Italy and magically turn them into beef. From there those prime cuts of Romanian horse off to meat processing plants and the next thing you know everyone in Britain who fancies a ready meal is munching on horse lasagne.

In the grand scheme of things it’s a very simple story, which I feel adds to it’s charm because it shows just how easy it is for one person making a decision in Bucharest to affect what a person on the other side of a continent ends up eating. It may be that in the longer term a decision designed primarily to improve Romanian transport ends up totally altering European food laws and that’s bound to have a whole range unintended consequences. Every decision we make is bound to impact somebody because the world is connected in the stupidest ways.

In the meantime it’s lent starting tomorrow so I'm not eating meat for the next few weeks. Hopefully the horse will have cleared out of the food chain by Easter (not that I really mind eating a bit of horse).