"In the end, in this particular case, more good would have been done if 99,999,950 pound coins had been buried at the bottom of a mine shaft and a 50 squid donation sent to feed a starving African child" – Tim Worstall, on the waste of time, effort and space that is the Sudan 1/Worcester sauce scandal.
More scaremongering at the Indy
I dunno. I think it’s probably a good thing that the food industry has been given a kicking over this issue, because it makes them realise that the FSA tells them to withdraw products, it means "get busy and bloody well do it".
If they’d been allowed to get away with sloppy practices on this one, then we might have got the same "hmmm, yeah, woteva" attitude when something genuinely dangerous came along. It’s like the broken window theory of policing applied to food companies.
Problem is: the fuss will die down and the Food Industry and the FSA will go back to business as normal in a few weeks time. The only way to make a longer-lasting change to the things we consume in our food is to take a personal, indiviual interest in it. That means reading the label, reading the origin tag, thinking about what must have happened for that item to reach the (super-)market, etc. The best these scares can do is get people talking about industrial food production, but it won’t guarantee that they see the light.
Personally, I think it’s all a conspiracy by Lea and Perrins to remind everyone that there’s only one real Worcestershire Sauce.