The intrepid BBC correspondent who reported the story was told that over the years the kebab scamsters had made millions of pounds from selling these kebabs. The BBC has been very agitated about a huge ‘fraud’ being perpetrated by a kebab maker in Essex. Apparently, the company behind this massive ‘fraud’ made millions by cheating the buyers of its kebabs.
If the BBC’s goat-fraud correspondent had been sent to India to find people labelling goat meat as lamb, he or she would probably have collapsed from exhaustion: That’s nearly every restaurant and kebabwallah who serves meat. So, the problem was not with health, safety or flavour. It was that the idea of eating goat shocked Brits. Once again this was not about health or flavour. Italians often eat pasta with a sauce that contains horsemeat. The problem was that people were horrified to discover that they were eating horse! It was the idea that was more distressing than the pasta sauce itself. It’s easy enough to tell the difference if you are cooking a steak. Only one buffalo steak cut — the undercut– can be mistaken for beef. Undercut is a term popular with Indian butchers but in the West the same cut is called fillet or, less commonly, tenderloin. That’s why Indian menus often refer to tenderloin. It could be buffalo or beef and restaurateurs like the ambiguity. A DNA test proved it was buffalo the happy diners were eating and the cops went home to eat crow. In the end it’s not about health or flavour. The objections to eating goat or buffalo stem only from cultural conditioning. We have our own conditioning: I doubt if many Indians can stand the faintly urinous taste of British kidneys on toast, and we would be shocked if we knew what went into Scotland’s national dish,haggis: It’s heart, liver, lungs and kidney fat.
The BBC report drew parallels with the 2013 horsemeat scandal when DNA tests demonstrated that packaged food companies were adding horse keema to beef ragu. Because there were millions more to go, the correspondent would have had to retire after covering the first million restaurants. Because of the density of its structure, buffalo meat is darker, less tender and usually takes longer to cook. Because of the political climate restaurateurs prefer to pass beef off as buffalo; it’s much safer that way, but. Because of the deliciousness of the chilli-fry in the canteen which, they were sure, must be made with beef, a decade ago, the Delhi Police raided Kerala Bhavan presumably.
