Horse Meat found in Tesco Beefburgers

[Fuchs66]

Just think of the uproar if it was discovered it was little fluffy kittens instead of horses

Mmmmmmm kitten-burger!

 

[sleaterkinney]

German-owned supermarket chain ALDI withdraws some beef products after tests reveal "between 30% and 100% horse meat"

 

[sleaterkinney]

*smug vegi post

Obligatory Hitler reference.

 

[goldenecitrone]

Well, at least people won't have to worry about getting BSE from it.

 

[dylans]

I wouldn't argue with what you're saying, but the impression I have is that good quality meat is not, in real terms, very much more expensive than it was before we had quite so much of this ultra-cheap meat: what has happened, it seems to me, is that we have got used to being able to source meat at a price which enables us to regard it as a daily essential (that certainly wasn't the case 40-50 years ago).

Clearly, those economies have been achieved at a price, and I guess that finding horse meat in our food supply is an example of that price.

I am a vegetarian, though I hope not a smug one, and I've been able to look in in some confusion as we've seen the price of meat drop to incredible levels - £2 chickens, etc. Maybe being veggie gives me a detachment I wouldn't otherwise have, but I have long wondered when the payback was going to come, and what form it might take.

And, I suppose, poorer - and possibly poorly educated on food - families are always going to buy the cheap meat if it is available, and are thus more likely to be the ones eating meat of dubious provenance, but I wonder what the economic implications on them would be to return to a 1960s-type meat diet, where it was available less often, but was more likely to be fresh, whole meat from a butcher's than something made in a factory?

Maybe I'm wrong - perhaps decent meat really is prohibitively expensive, now, but isn't the price we're paying for cheap meat pretty steep, too, if there's the risk that dangerous substances are going to end up in the food chain ?

It's also about time. Its not just cheap meat. I mean, its still cheaper to cook a lasagne from scratch and freeze portions than it is to buy prepackaged ones but prepackaged stuff is easy especially if people are juggling taking care of the family with holding down a job etc. You buy it, throw it in the microwave, cook some oven chips and dinner is done.

I have a kid and I am very conscious of his diet. This means two things. First it means I spend a lot of time cooking and it means I spend more than I can really afford. I only work part time and I don't have a life beyond my son so I have the time for that but for many people neither of these options are easy.

Part of it is education sure, lots of people can't cook or think they can't but for many people I think they just don't have the time to do it. For people with money thats not a problem because they can buy higher quality products but for someone taking care of a family on shitty wages, lack of money and lack of time combines to create a toxic combination of wanting easy to cook food at cheap prices. Supermarkets cater to that and the result is horsey burgers and mechanically separated shite

 

[sunny jim]

That would make it an order of magnitude more serious if confirmed. Not only mislabelling food but selling us poisoned food.

An FSA spokeswoman has just said on Channel 4 news its likely the code labelling on the horse meat was changed meaning its likely it came from a source that wasnt meant for human consumption.

 

[stuff_it]

fuck right off you charmless slimey soggy biscuit
and i'm leaving it there

Biscuitist!

 

[gentlegreen]

Better donkey than soylent green

Hasn't been nearly enough references to this.
I may have to actually watch the film now.

 

[frogwoman]

Just think of the uproar if it was discovered it was little fluffy kittens instead of horses

Cat meat probably does get in to the production process somewhere along the line.

 

[Frances Lengel]

I wouldn't argue with what you're saying, but the impression I have is that good quality meat is not, in real terms, very much more expensive than it was before we had quite so much of this ultra-cheap meat: what has happened, it seems to me, is that we have got used to being able to source meat at a price which enables us to regard it as a daily essential (that certainly wasn't the case 40-50 years ago).

Clearly, those economies have been achieved at a price, and I guess that finding horse meat in our food supply is an example of that price.

I am a vegetarian, though I hope not a smug one, and I've been able to look in in some confusion as we've seen the price of meat drop to incredible levels - £2 chickens, etc. Maybe being veggie gives me a detachment I wouldn't otherwise have, but I have long wondered when the payback was going to come, and what form it might take.

And, I suppose, poorer - and possibly poorly educated on food - families are always going to buy the cheap meat if it is available, and are thus more likely to be the ones eating meat of dubious provenance, but I wonder what the economic implications on them would be to return to a 1960s-type meat diet, where it was available less often, but was more likely to be fresh, whole meat from a butcher's than something made in a factory?

Maybe I'm wrong - perhaps decent meat really is prohibitively expensive, now, but isn't the price we're paying for cheap meat pretty steep, too, if there's the risk that dangerous substances are going to end up in the food chain ?

I'm not sure if I agree with that - The way I see it ultra cheap meat comes at the price of factory farming (which I don't really have a problem with), still though, just coz it's cheap there's no reason for dogfood to be going in the mix. What I'm trying to say is cheap meat is never going to be great quality but that's not to say that dangerous substances ending up in there are an inevitable consequence of it's cheapness.

 

[ddraig]

like cost cutting, privatisation etc don't lead to dangerous working conditions and less pay?

 

[Frances Lengel]

like cost cutting, privatisation etc don't lead to dangerous working conditions and less pay?

Of course they do - And dogfood getting into the mix is most definitely a pretty much inevitable consequence of privatisation and lax regulation. But it most certainly isn't an inevitable consequence of factory farming per se. I'm quite happy to buy £2 per kilo minced beef knowing it's typically 23% fat and contains skull fragments and connective tissue and all that good stuff (it makes a decent chilli, the fat offsets the hotness and you're only going to shit it out anyway), now that's as it should be, but there's no reason for unfit for human consumption meat ending up in mince and burgers as an inevitable consequence of factory farming - The only reason unfit meat is being sneaked in is corruption/lax regulations.

 

[junglevip]

A case for eating a predominantly vegetarian diet if ever there was one. Only eat animals that you kill and butcher yourself is the way to go. I personally have done that myself but have not gone the 'whole hog' *ahem*. I only by meat I buy these days is stuff that I stand a pretty good chance of knowing what animals it is I am eating.

Shin of beef is my main thing at the mo, about 50g per serving. Its basically stock; root veg is the bulk; it is in season, cheap and I am pretty certain the carrots I just ate, are actually carrots.

 

[existentialist]

I'm not sure if I agree with that - The way I see it ultra cheap meat comes at the price of factory farming (which I don't really have a problem with), still though, just coz it's cheap there's no reason for dogfood to be going in the mix. What I'm trying to say is cheap meat is never going to be great quality but that's not to say that dangerous substances ending up in there are an inevitable consequence of it's cheapness.

Thing is, it's a progressive thing. We got meat cheaper by industrialising the process of producing it: battery farming in the case of chickens, intensive feedlots in the case of cattle, being fed with corn, rather than grass. That introduces its own problems - rampant salmonella contamination in fowl, rampant E. coli infection in beef - but at least they're "natural" problems. And we get cheap meat.

Then we need cheaper meat. So we start feeding animals protein made from ground-up dead animals - it's more nutritious than grass OR corn, after all. And we discover that, in doing that, we've succeeded in transmitting a rather mundane sheep disease - scrapie - into the cattle food chain, as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). That goes on for goodness knows how long before it's uncovered (despite the efforts of the government of the day to pretend there isn't a problem - seeing a picture?).

Meanwhile, they're trying to make meat even cheaper: so it becomes OK to make a beefburger with 49% beef. But it's not "meaty" enough, so we need "filler". No problem, we'll add protein. So we start using cheap sources - all the offcuts and odd bits of the cow that might otherwise get wasted are dried out, ground up, and added back in.

And once you've started reducing animals to a state of unrecognisability, to the point that the only way you can distinguish between one kind of animal and another is via DNA testing the material, then it becomes easy for people, either unscrupulously, or carelessly, to start supplying big sacks of "animal protein" that isn't cow, but something else. And, of course, if you can't even tell what species it is, what chance do you have of knowing whether it was a horse, aardvark, elephant or three-toed sloth raised for human consumption or something raised in a completely different way and unfit for human consumption.

I wouldn't go so far as to insist that all industrialised farming is a Bad Thing, or that we should never have done it...but once we started making compromises on the integrity of our food, we were opening a Pandora's box, and were always going to require some very, very close oversight to make sure bad things didn't happen. We clearly haven't done that - arguably, because at some point or another we got to the point where, without having the most ridiculously expensive and comprehensive inspection and traceability routines, it simply became too easy for someone to start introducing knacker's yard horse into the equation...

 

[sunny jim]

I'm not sure if I agree with that - The way I see it ultra cheap meat comes at the price of factory farming (which I don't really have a problem with), still though, just coz it's cheap there's no reason for dogfood to be going in the mix. What I'm trying to say is cheap meat is never going to be great quality but that's not to say that dangerous substances ending up in there are an inevitable consequence of it's cheapness.

Horses not for human consumption - which is what the FSA are saying it could well be and the cops are investigating this - are going to end up as dogfood. Well, thats whats meant to happen,

 

[Frances Lengel]

Thing is, it's a progressive thing. We got meat cheaper by industrialising the process of producing it: battery farming in the case of chickens, intensive feedlots in the case of cattle, being fed with corn, rather than grass. That introduces its own problems - rampant salmonella contamination in fowl, rampant E. coli infection in beef - but at least they're "natural" problems. But we get cheap meat.

Then we need cheaper meat. So we start feeding animals protein made from ground-up dead animals - it's more nutritious than grass OR corn, after all. And we discover that, in doing that, we've succeeded in transmitting a rather mundane sheep disease - scrapie - into the cattle food chain, as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). That goes on for goodness knows how long before it's uncovered (despite the efforts of the government of the day to pretend there isn't a problem - seeing a picture?).

Meanwhile, they're trying to make meat even cheaper: so it becomes OK to make a beefburger with 49% beef. But it's not "meaty" enough, so we need "filler". No problem, we'll add protein. So we start using cheap sources - all the offcuts and odd bits of the cow that might otherwise get wasted are dried out, ground up, and added back in.

And once you've started reducing animals to a state of unrecognisability, to the point that the only way you can distinguish between one kind of animal and another, then it becomes easy for people, either unscrupulously, or carelessly, to start supplying big sacks of "animal protein" that isn't cow, but something else. And, of course, if you can't even tell what species it is, what chance do you have of knowing whether it was a horse, aardvark, elephant or three-toed sloth raised for human consumption or something raised in a completely different way and unfit for human consumption.

I wouldn't go so far as to insist that all industrialised farming is a Bad Thing, or that we should never have done it...but once we started making compromises on the integrity of our food, we were opening a Pandora's box, and were always going to require some very, very close oversight to make sure bad things didn't happen. We clearly haven't done that - arguably, because at some point or another we got to the point where, without having the most ridiculously expensive and comprehensive inspection and traceability routines, it simply became too easy for someone to start introducing knacker's yard horse into the equation...

Absolutely, but if the very close oversights are introduced somewhere towards the end of paragraph three in your post I can't really see a problem.

E.coli's a shiitgerm - The only way E.coli's getting into the mix is coz of deskilled butchering practices. Though that is another side of the factory farming coin.

Good post though - But I can't really see an alternative to industrial farming, regulation is what's needed.

 

[existentialist]

Absolutely, but if the very close oversights are introduced somewhere towards the end of paragraph three in your post I can't really see a problem.

E.coli's a shiitgerm - The only way E.coli's getting into the mix is coz of deskilled butchering practices. Though that is another side of the factory farming coin.

Good post though - But I can't really see an alternative to industrial farming, regulation is what's needed.

Yes, E. coli is a shitgerm, but the more dangerous varieties (eg 0157) seem to thrive in cattle which are not eating their natural diet (that'd be grass, then ), and spreads like wildfire amongst cattle which are crammed into feedlots at densities far above what they would be at usually.

And then, as you say, you've got the high-speed lines in US abattoirs, low-skilled staff, and all the rest of it exacerbating the problem.

 

[Orang Utan]

I was in a tesco express this evening and there was a poster promising to introduce DNA testing of all meats.

 

[sleaterkinney]

Another point, any profits from industrialised farming don't go to the farmers, they're sucked up by the supermarkets

 

[bi0boy]

The FSA should have been doing such testing anyway, although it probably comes under the remit of Trading Standards. I guess it was fine having each local council responsible for running a Trading Standards service when everyone bought food at their local market, but with national supply and distribution, we really need a national Trading Standards organisation to get on top of this shit. Or they could just transfer responsibility to the FSA who as far as I am aware are only responsible for domestic slaughterhouses and have no remit over imported meat in shops.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Cat meat probably does get in to the production process somewhere along the line.

How?

 

[existentialist]

The FSA should have been such testing anyway, although it probably comes under the remit of Trading Standards. I guess it was fine having each local council responsible for running a Trading Standards service when everyone bought food at their local market, but with national supply and distribution, we really need a national Trading Standards organisation to get on top of this shit. Or they could just transfer responsibility to the FSA who as far as I am aware are only responsible for domestic slaughterhouses and have remit over imported meat in shops.

DNA testing is expensive, though.

And has never been needed before, because the scope for sneaking other species into the food supply hasn't ever been as great. Or as profitable.

 

[bi0boy]

DNA testing is expensive, though.

No it isn't. Kits like this are only £200 or so. That's for testing 100 products. Even cheaper to make your own kits if you're doing it large scale and long term

 

[Frances Lengel]

Another point, any profits from industrialised farming don't go to the farmers, they're sucked up by the supermarkets

That, again, isn't a problem that's intrinsic to industrial farming, it's just the way it's done ATM.

 

[weltweit]

I was in a tesco express this evening and there was a poster promising to introduce DNA testing of all meats.

I was in one too, didn't notice a sign but it could have been there. I bought tesco minced beef and I wondered, what does it actually have in it ?

 

[DexterTCN]

So....prices will be going up, I guess.

 

[Frances Lengel]

So....prices will be going up, I guess.

That's how it's going to go for sure.

 

[Orang Utan]

One would have almost have thought that they may have even done this on purpose.

 

[weltweit]

One would have almost have thought that they may have even done this on purpose.

Not Findus, at least I doubt. 100% horse in Lasagne. Not sure people will trust them in the future.

 

[Orang Utan]

Find our crispy pancakes