Sausage Wars prove Brexit was always on the menu | Economic Times

Industrial Revolution in Britain meant a greater need for foods for rapidly growing cities, and a more relaxed attitude to what went into them.For 'Yes Minister' fans, the current ‘Sausage War’ between the European Union and Britain should seem familiar. A key episode involves the minister, Jim Hacker, fighting an EU diktat that said British standards for sausages are so low they must be renamed ‘Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tubes’. His defence of British sausages proves to be so popular that it helps him become prime minister.In reality, Britain aligned with EU sausage standards — until Brexit. Now they can differ again, which is a problem for Northern Ireland, which must maintain a borderless market with Ireland as part of the 1998 treaty that ended its civil war. Until July 1, Northern Ireland can get sausages from the rest of Britain, but time is almost up. Britain insists Northern Ireland continues to get its sausages, but the EU refuses, since those sausages could reach EU Ireland. This porky problem almost overshadowed the recent G7 summit.For most people, sausages can be delicious, faintly comic, or even disgusting, as Prakash Tandon felt when, as he recounts in his memoir 'Punjabi Century', he first saw the British eating them and thought it proof they ate even the “most private part” of the pig.But their political problem stems from the fact that they consist of meat parts chopped and stuffed into casings and, unless we made them ourselves, we won’t know which parts. We must eat them on trust, just appreciating the end result, which is the point of the parallel that German statesman Otto von Bismarck is said to have made: “Laws are like sausages. It’s best not to see them being made.”As it happens, one of Germany oldest laws is Bavaria’s Reinheitsgebot, from 1516, which lays strict standards for beer. In 1871, when Bismarck was unifying Germany, Bavaria refused to join unless this law was adopted, and this is cited to prove how foundational the idea of food purity was for Germany. This was reinforced, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an article on German sausages, when “in 2000, an amateur historian discovered, in the Weimar city archives, a worn handwritten document from 1432, which stipulated that Thüringer-Rostbratwurst, among the most famous of German sausages, could only be made from pure, fresh pork”.The British were more hands-off. Their earlier start to the Industrial Revolution meant greater need for foods for rapidly growing cities, and a more relaxed attitude to what went into them, like a high proportion of rusks in sausages. This doesn’t mean they are bad, or that EU sausages are always good. In fact, Guillaume Coudray’s recent book 'Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?' argues that most processed meats are now dangerously substandard due to widespread adoption of industrial production systems pioneered in the US.But major parts of the EU, like Germany and France, are deeply committed to an idea of food purity upheld by strict standards, while Britain takes a more pragmatic approach. It explains the 'Sausage Wars' and perhaps why Brexit was always likely to be on the menu.