Tag: horsemeat

With lots of jokes about the horse meat issue facing many of the suppliers of meat in our country, I’ve found myself mentally checking off the Dalepack, Findus, Tesco, Lidl and Aldi brands of any sort of meat.  I know that is actually completely ridiculous, but how many people feel the same way as I do about the horse meat scandal?

The Food Standards Agency seem to be more involved now and I hope they do decide to do mandatory tests on hospital and school meals as many of those are done on such a low price point per person when admin costs are taken off.

Those who can afford to buy proper meat from a good butcher will go and do exactly that.  Those who can’t afford to do that have no choice but to eat the cheap meat on supermarket shelves.  It always makes me cringe when I read the ingredients lists and the thought of the “pink slime” made me rightly or wrongly shy away from lots of meat products.  In my opinion cheap beefburgers probably seem to be a good place to hide undesirable ingredients.

People really don’t want to have to think that they could have eaten a former pet, discarded thoroughbred or seaside pony.  As a nation, we see horses as pets in the same way that we see dogs, cats, gerbils, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs.  In France, they do eat lots of horse, but I’d bet with the current state of play, they’d also be annoyed as it really isn’t about the horses.

It’s about not knowing what’s in our food.  If I knew horse or pink slime was in food, I’d rather feed my kids veggie.  The whole point is that we’ve been scammed as a nation, and that’s the most horrible thing about it all.

I want to know what is in my food, in my kids food, and in my animals food.  Criminal activity or not, someone somewhere put people at risk.

It’s been stated as not being a food health issue as if that makes it okay.  What if it hadn’t been horse?  What if it had been arsenic or poison, or something else?  Somewhere in the process and procedures, testing and quality assurance failed.

I hate the thought of mechanically processed food.  A chef once showed me the contents of a cheap commercial value pack of mince.  He rolled it out in his hand and showed me a bit of cheek and an eyelash.  I’ve never bought value mince products since that day.  He described it as the head stuck on a centrifuge and the contents forced off at speed.  Whether it was true or  false, it put me off for life.   I don’t think cheap meat is worth buying when we have no idea what it is that is actually in it.

If I couldn’t afford decent mince, I’d rather make lentil casserole instead – and I’m intolerant of lentils.  We all make our own choices, but I’d love to know how much cheap meat products have suffered this last week or so.

A dozen burgers for £1 are never going to be great quality, but the people buying them deserve to know exactly what’s in them.