http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/world/europe/recipe-for-divided-europe-add-horse-then-stir.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=world
New
York Times
10
March 2013
By
ANDREW HIGGINS
[...]
When it was first discovered that lasagna on sale in France
and Britain contained horse
meat, Romania,
the second-poorest country in the European Union, was immediately cast as the
culprit. Fed by mostly fictitious accounts of a mass slaughter of Romanian
horses after the introduction of new traffic rules banning horse-drawn carts,
the news media in France and
Britain
reported that hundreds of thousands of Romanian horses had suddenly entered the
food chain.
"It
is total nonsense," said Lucian Dinita, the chief of Romania's road
police. The nation, he said, did introduce a law in 2006 restricting
horse-drawn carts on roads, but it was scrapped two years later and led to no
mass culling of unemployed horses.
Some
of the horse meat that ended up in processed foods sold in France and other
countries did originate in Romania, but a French government report issued last
month said this had been clearly labeled as coming from horses, not cows. The
fraudulent substitution of horse meat for beef - about three times the cost -
occurred at a factory in southern France, the report said. [...]