Letter from Africa: Faking your fufu?

I have been following the horse meat for beef scandals in Europe with very keen interest. At first I thought it was most unlikely that the scandal would have reached Ghana. We are not in the processed food business here; we start the preparation of every meal from scratch and therefore there is a lot of grinding and pounding in the kitchen. Last week I took a closer look at the frozen foods section in my local supermarket and saw quite a number of frozen beef burgers on display. The countries of origin of the food packets in my supermarket seemed to be the same as the ones making news around Europe.

So I decided that there was the real likelihood that horse meat has been sold here masqueraded as beef. Having accepted this I began thinking of the cavalier attitude we have in these parts towards the labelling of products and the implacable resistance to food processing. As far as labelling goes, the position seems to be, you put on the product whatever label the would-be customer wants - and we are not talking only about food. continued