Full circle

A butterfly flaps its wings.

In 2007 Romania banned horse carriages on its roads. As a result there were lots of unemployed horses around. Fast forward to 2013 and the food scandal that has rocked Europe. Turns out that the Romanian horses are showing up in lasagna and other prepared foods supposed to contain ground beef.

 

 

In Iceland we do not shy away from eating horse meat. We do like to know when we are being served it and would not like to be sold beef and get horse. I do not know if it was because of this or because we did not want to be any less vigilant that other European countries but Iceland decided to do testing of its own market. The results were pretty darn good for most of our producers as the ingredients proved to be in check with the labeling. There was only one exception actually, a company that specialized in making meat pies – that were supposed to contain ground beef. I am going to keep you waiting a bit before telling you what the meat pies actually contained.

 

Now the meat pie company will probably have to change its name. To be realistic there is no probably about it. They will have to change their name. And logo.
 

A logo here probably costs around 100.000 krona. This is about 800 dollars or 600 Euros. Hopefully the meat company will have some funds stashed away to fork this out.

 

 

Some Icelandic companies like one called „Strobe.is“ do not have such funds despite needing a logo. Either that or these guys thought they could be smart and get away with paying less by throwing a competition. It did not work out so well. The prize money, 10.000 kr, was considered insulting so the competition was bombarded by trolls and the competition page filled up with ridiculous logos. I spent over an hour laughing my head off at the submissions and the text that was added to explain what each logo represented - and what the artists said they intended to do with the money. In the end they increased the prize money and ended up with an OK logo. But here are some examples of the troll logos – 10.000 kr will not buy you much it seems:

 

 

 

So, what did the meat pies turn out to contain? Horse meat? Chicken? Pork? Rat? Nope, none of those. Turned out the meat pies had no meat at all. None whatsoever. They could not have had a bigger food shocker in Iceland than that. Horse meat would not have turned many heads but no meat - the company is going down.

 

 

Yrsa - Wednesday