Supermarkets pull items off shelves over meat fears

Edwardia

I'm NOT listing this stuff with any intent to be snobby. We eat organic because I have diabetes and eating low carb organic keeps it stable and me on fewer drugs. Until March 2012 I shopped mostly at Lidl and ASDA.

Although my food is mostly delivered by Ocado, Abel & Cole and Riverford Organics, it often comes from actual farms and bakeries eg

Milk
Berkeley Farm, Wroughton, Wiltshire

Yoghurt
Yeo Valley Dairy, Blagdon, Somerset www.yeovalley.co.uk
Brown Cow Organics, Pilton. Somerset
www.browncoworganics.co.uk

Cheese
High Weald Dairy, Horsted Keynes, W Sussex www.highwealddairy.co.uk
Green's of Glastonbury, West Pennard, Somerset www.greensofglastonbury.co.uk
Lye Cross Farm, Redhill, Somerset www.lyecrossfarm.co.uk

Eggs
Haresfield Farm, Stanton St Quinton, Wiltshire www.haresfieldfarm.co.uk

Ghee (clarified butter)
Netherend Farm, Lydney, Gloucestershire www.netherendfarmbutter.co.uk

Bread and Cakes (for OH)
Gail's Bread, Northcote Rd, SW11 www.gailsbread.co.uk
Flour Power City Bakery, Juno Way, SE14 www.flourpowercity.co.uk
Eghoyans Pitta Bakery, West Road, N17
Daylesford Organic Farm, Kingham, Gloucestershire www.daylesfordorganic.com
Riverford Farm, Buckfastleigh, Devon www.riverford.co.uk
Respect Organics, Shaftesbury, Dorset www.respectorganics.com

Meat (some)
Laverstoke Park Farm, Overton, Hampshire
www.laverstokepark.co.uk

Game
Hampshire Game www.hampshiregame.co.uk

Poultry
Daylesford Organic Farm as before

Vegetables (some)
Upper Norton Farm, Sutton Scotney, Hampshire

We're trying to eat healthily and support British agriculture as much as poss and with that kind of traceability I believe that I'm getting what we pay (more) for. Some people spend money on vacations, bingo, cigarettes, designer clothes - we prioritise food.

I would like to know more about some of the veg I buy but it's really expensive so I often have to buy that from supermarkets. I'm also looking for farms online to buy meat and game from.

[Deleted User]

Food adulteration has been around alot longer than either food additives or supermarkets:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Swindled-Poison-Sweets-Counterfeit-History/dp/0719567858

It doesn't need to be either horsemeat or processed foodstuff for it to happen either, it's not that long since we had the gang washing the smell out of condemned poultry and putting it back into the food chain.

Edwardia

Off the top of my head I think one reason why brands came into being was because food was being adulterated in Victorian era.

Found this speculating on legislation

http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Quality-Safety/More-regulation-on-the-horizon-following-horse-meat-scandal

Fire_Fox

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

Edwina so you believe that things say on food labels?

so di people when they were buying beef burgers, lasagne, spag bal etc;)

What percentage of people eating Findus or Value lasagne do you honestly believe read the label to check even the percentage of meat let alone the source? People read the front of the pack, the advertising basically, often not the ingredients or nutrition panel. I think the public would not notice if the regular mince was 100% equine and certainly if the fillet steak was. My seventy something aunt was telling me recently she still has the butcher grind her mince or even does it herself.

I honestly think most people are getting all outraged because they are media sheep. Of course there are all sorts of suspect ingredients in processed meat products, duh, that is what many products and dishes were invented for, to use up the scraps! :rotfl: Maybe we should be asking ourselves why we only think pre packaged skinless chicken breasts are healthy real meat, horse and offal are unacceptable, yet we eat mountains of cheapo sausages, burgers, 'meat' pies and pasties.

I'm not missing the point by saying that, it's just that what I think is surprising or important about all this is not the same as the Daily Fail. I have a reasonable idea what is in most of my food because when I buy it most doesn't look too different than when it came off the plant or animal. Horse chemicals don't scare me any more than any other farming or veterinary product that could be in the intensively farmed stuff I buy.

Edwardia

Between school and college I worked on a stud farm for a couple of months and phenylbutazone is something I wouldn't want to ingest.

I saw heavily pregnant mares barely able to stagger without it, walking normally because they couldn't feel the pain or the damage so it must be pretty powerful stuff.

Ready meals are not necessarily cheaper than cooking from scratch but someone may choose to eat them because they live alone and they don't feel it's worth it cooking for themselves. Or they may be unable to cook. Or they may buy a whole load on special offer and shove them in the freezer for convenience. Someone doing 14 hr days or weird shifts may not want to cook at midnight or 4am.

The reason for ignoring the ingredients may be denial rather than ignorance. Lack of money isn't the only reason why people choose ready meals. If you feel it's your only option, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to think what it could be doing to you..

Fire_Fox

Edwardia wrote: »

Between school and college I worked on a stud farm for a couple of months and phenylbutazone is something I wouldn't want to ingest.

I saw heavily pregnant mares barely able to stagger without it, walking normally because they couldn't feel the pain or the damage so it must be pretty powerful stuff.

Ready meals are not necessarily cheaper than cooking from scratch but someone may choose to eat them because they live alone and they don't feel it's worth it cooking for themselves. Or they may be unable to cook. Or they may buy a whole load on special offer and shove them in the freezer for convenience. Someone doing 14 hr days or weird shifts may not want to cook at midnight or 4am.

The reason for ignoring the ingredients may be denial rather than ignorance. Lack of money isn't the only reason why people choose ready meals. If you feel it's your only option, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to think what it could be doing to you..

Half life of phenylbutazone in horses is five to six hours so the time between dosing and death is highly relevant, tho it is much longer in humans so frequency of ingestion of any contaminated products could be important. Can't imagine you'd hit anything like the therapeutic window from a product containing 16% horsemeat unless that was all you ate.

I've heard all those excuses, hell I've made several myself. It's individual choice whether they make excuses or find solutions (eg. basic batch cooking using slow cooker) but there is no sense in whinging about possible traces of a veterinary drug if they are eating !!!!py ready meals regularly. The reality is if we eat a nutrient dense balanced diet, maintain a healthy weight and get enouygh physical activity our organs of excretion are so much better equipped to process and eliminate any toxin residues we might ingest.

Maybe this will be blessing in disguise, make some people think about what they are eating, take more ownership of what they stick in their gobs and open their eyes to the shady practices of the supermarkets and food product manufacturers. It will be interesting to see if there are any revelations about plain beef mince sold directly to the public or if it is limited to meat products.

A._Badger

The 'it's cheaper to eat rubbish which is why the poor do it' argument is just a hoary old myth. It has been debunked many times. here is just one (there's a nice pictogram in the leftmost column for the hard of reading).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?_r=3&

Edwardia

The New York Times published an article by journalist Gary Taubes entitled ' What If It's All A Big Fat Lie ?' which has provoked thousands of people over the years to start questioning the whole low fat mantra.

I am not necessarily on the same page as Marion Nestle but I'd be in the same book and www.foodpolitics.com is interesting.

One calorie is the energy required to heat one gram of water by one degree C. That's pretty meaningless applied to food.

Think of your body as a car for a moment. If you put say 30 litres of petrol (measured amount of calories from same food) in car A and car B, even if the cars were identical, built on the same production line, same age, same weight, same dimensions, same colour, no two cars would burn the fuel in the same way. Nor do we.

Saying a calorie is a calorie is rubbish - 100 calories of fat, protein and carbohydrate are dealt with differently by the body.

So to me the talk about calories i the NYT article is a massive red herring. WHAT we eat is at least as important as, if not more important thanm how MUCH we eat, otherwise I would still be humoungously fat.

Fire Fox pointed out on another thread that there's way less meat content in a ready meal lasagne than if you made it yourself which is a valid point that gets overlooked all the time. :T

I don't possess any kitchen scales so I can't do it but if someone could work out how much in grams the meat content of a cheap lasagne is then we could test the NYT theory

A._Badger

I'm not sure which NYT article you are referring to, Edwardia. If it's the Mark Bittman article I posted, what he is establishing is how wrong are those who claim that people eat 'fast food' because it is cheap. It isn't. People eat it for all sorts of reasons - price isn't the deciding factor.

The low fat obsession has been a busted flush for years - as has so much of the pseudo-scientific nutritional orthodoxy. Look at how the establishment hounded poor Dr Robert Atkins who, for all that he clearly didn't have all the answers, was a probably good deal closer to the truth than the food pyramid gauleiters, whose grasp of reality (as you may have demonstrated with your diabetic journey) is fragile, at best.

Cornucopia

Is it just me or does this issue have all the hallmarks of fake scandal about it?

I can understand how a meat supply line gets cross-contaminated, and a few % of, say, pork gets into a beef line. That's carelessness.

But it defies belief that a product could ever get to be 100% horsemeat, given the mass production methods we are talking about. For that to happen, the entire meat source for a production run (of 1000s of packs) would have to be entirely horsemeat - tonnes of meat would be involved. Only fraud at a mammoth level combined with gross negligence on the part of the authorities and the retailers could produce this outcome, and I am not sure that I believe that.

I am also very skeptical about all the "what do we expect from cheap food" propaganda. Seems like just another way to bash the poor.

Do people who believe in the evils of mass production really think that the industry would only exploit cheap food?