Obesity...and horses

Have you ever heard of the term food poverty? What images spring to mind? Starving children in Africa, for a guess. Homeless people, slum children, picking food out of bins. Well, you're not wrong. Food poverty means having insufficient money to buy the food necessary for good health. However, there is a swathe of people that you probably don't consider as particularly food impoverished, and that's people on a very low income, for example on benefits or only doing very low paid work.
This means people eating something on toast for tea, every day. People being unable to afford fruit and vegetables because they are more expensive, per calorie, than processed food and because they don't necessarily have access to them. My local shop sells a bit of manky fruit and veg, usually on the very edge of mouldy, at a very inflated price. I am lucky: I live within walking distance of a Morrisons and have the internet so get my shopping delivered. If I was dependent on what was available at the Nisa, I'd almost never eat fruit or veg. A diet of processed food, because is cheap and definitely going to be eaten. If you cannot afford to have extra food in the house and a meal is uneaten because nobody likes it, that's a waste of money with nobody being fed.
And what is the upshot of this unhealthy lifestyle? It means eating more sugar, salt and saturated fat than a higher income family. It means an increased likelihood of heart disease, cancer, infant and child malnutrition, increased risk of osteoporosis in the elderly, lowered birthweight (which is linked to higher mortality in general). It means obesity.
So, what are our benevolent leaders planning to do to combat the problem of food poverty? Well, they're planning to cut the benefits of obese people who refuse to exercise. Obesity, and it's attendant health problems, costs the NHS millions. However, unlike cigarettes, you cannot merely tax people for being fat, so instead they must be punished in the only way this government knows how - by cutting yet more benefits. This fails to take into account WHY people are obese - the health, cultural and emotional factors involved. Well over half the population are overweight or obese, yet only the poor are being punished for it.
I can think of several different ways to combat food poverty. Make fruit and vegetables part of a community growing initiative. People on income support can get vouchers for fruit and vegetables, why not extend that to all on a low income? Children are no longer being taught to cook at school, and may be raised by parents who also have no idea to cook, so put food back on the curriculum and hold cooking classes - not "How To Bake Artisan Bread' style ones - in community centres. Only by moving away from dependance on processed food can food poverty and linked obesity start to change.

Speaking of processed food, SHOCK and it's sister OUTRAGE have been expressed about horse DNA being found in bargain burgers at various national supermarkets. The false advertising element of this case is pretty shocking, but not exactly unique. Unless stated otherwise, you can guarantee that the meat you buy has led a shit, factory-farmed life. This is especially true in processed food. Those chicken nuggets? Unless it says otherwise, the meat was jetwashed off the battery-farmed carcass and then reformed. Battery farming means your chicken was raised in an area the size of a sheet of A4 paper, standing in it's own shit, being pumped full of hormones and water for three months. There's a reason we don't get chickens with the lower legs and feet left on, like on the continent - the ammonia burns would seriously put people off buying them.
Your bacon is full of water. Your sausages are full of cereal and gawd only knows where the meat originated. Your pork is similar to the poor chicken. And your beefburgers may, apparently, be full of horse.
What I don't understand is why the idea of eating horse shocks people so badly. A cow is no less an animal than a horse. You could probably ride a cow, if it'd let you, but we don't. Cows are, in British culture, meat. Horses are pretty things we ride around on. But when, as a nation, we are unwilling to treat the animals destined for our table with anything like the respect we treat our pets, we can't be overly surprised if we get what we pay for.