Will it stop you buying frozen ready meals

Fruball

kittie wrote: »

also now testing chicken for introduced fillers, lamb, pork. Testing for horse isn`t enough, rat cat dog and human (lets not be squeamsih this is coming from back alleys and via the murfia)

:eek: Oh Kittie.... I have always suspected some of those, but human? :eek: That never crossed my mind but you are right, anything is possible _pale_

I am genuinely thinking of going back to being vegetarian... Been thinking about it for a while for various reasons but I do love meat :cool:

tina_malteser

Fruball wrote: »

:eek: Oh Kittie.... I have always suspected some of those, but human? :eek: That never crossed my mind but you are right, anything is possible _pale_

I am genuinely thinking of going back to being vegetarian... Been thinking about it for a while for various reasons but I do love meat :cool:

you do here some horrid stories of humans being fed to the pigs!!!
So it could be in the food supply somewhere, Sweeney Todd meat pie anyone???:eek:

[Deleted User]

I stopped buying frozen ready meals a long time ago as they usually taste too salty for my taste and I used to wonder about the ingredients.
Having a slow cooker makes things so much more versatile and it's so easy to make a large amount and freeze in portions for taking to work. When we're fed up with spag.bol,, kormas, chilli and suchlike we just switch to jacket spuds. All of our frozen meals we take to work.

Hobsons_Choice

:eek:Just seen the headlines of the news that said they were looking into processing plants in Wales and Yorkshire re the horse meat scandal

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

Would it stop me buying ready meals. No.

I did not buy them before, so no change there then.

At my first job, Findus Pelham Road. Was warned about the dangers of double processed foods, i.e., food that has been processed once, stored, then processed again. Such as mixed veg, first processed to frozen. Then taken out of cold store and mixed. Time out of cold store is ...

As for the shergar meals, cheap and profit. It was not meant to be good for you.

foxgloves

I don't buy ready meals & get most of our meat from local butchers. I realise that many families are on critically low budgets, but if you see what mince costs in the butcher, & compare it with the cost of value frozen burgers, then the question has to be asked 'How do they do it?' Then 'What's in it?' Even when I didn't know it was sometimes horse, I'd certainly expect it to contain mechanically recovered meat slurry, gristle, sinews, general abbatoir floor-sweepings. Once it's all minced up & seasoned, let's face it, it could be anything! I hope local butchers gain new custom from this, but I don't expect they will, as so many people seem so reluctant to cook. I can make lovely burgers from scratch, but if I had to put a ready-meal in a microwave, I'd have to ask someone how to do it, as have simply no idea how to use one. It is a myth that healthy food has to be more expensive, but having cooking skills is the key thing.

honeythewitch

foxgloves wrote: »

I don't buy ready meals & get most of our meat from local butchers. I realise that many families are on critically low budgets, but if you see what mince costs in the butcher, & compare it with the cost of value frozen burgers, then the question has to be asked 'How do they do it?' Then 'What's in it?' Even when I didn't know it was sometimes horse, I'd certainly expect it to contain mechanically recovered meat slurry, gristle, sinews, general abbatoir floor-sweepings. Once it's all minced up & seasoned, let's face it, it could be anything! I hope local butchers gain new custom from this, but I don't expect they will, as so many people seem so reluctant to cook. I can make lovely burgers from scratch, but if I had to put a ready-meal in a microwave, I'd have to ask someone how to do it, as have simply no idea how to use one. It is a myth that healthy food has to be more expensive, but having cooking skills is the key thing.

It is an opportunity for small butchers to fill the gap with their own low cost burgers and sausages, if it is possible.
It is obvious that you wont get the finest cuts in a cheap product but it can still be nutritious and taste good.

lobbyludd

I don't care that it is horse, I don't care that cheap processed meat is the rendered seasoned unpopular bits that very few people feel is palatable when it is presented as it came from the animal.

I care that it wasn't what was on the label, was fraudulent, has an unknown provenence and could contain anything.

It is passingly possible that I have consumed some. I don't eat ready meals, which isn't a moral decision, it's because in general I don't like the taste, but I also don't mince my own beef from choice cuts of daisy, the grass-fed cow I raised from birth.

This isn't about "ready meal" culture or the loss of cooking skills or laziness, it's about fraud, which will have been a part of eating food since the beginning of agriculture and bartering.

MadelinesMum

missrlr wrote: »

I grew up without ready meals, we did have a Findus crispy pancake as a treat once, the chicken filling and neither sister or I liked it so Mum never bothered again.

My mum used to feed me crispy pancakes as a treat but I always though the meat was a funny consistancy, like some of the cheap spag bols you get now - I wonder if they have always had horsemeat in them? I wouldn't be surprised :eek:

FairyPrincessk

We rarely eat ready meals. They're too expensive and not very healthy for a start. However, we did eat quite a few when we moved house last summer. I was using up as much as possible out of the freezer and cupboards, and there were a few nights where cooking wasn't a possibility as we painted and moved. I'm fairly certain that we ate some of the beef burgers at one point as I remember them because I usually make my own burgers and was surprised by just how bad the frozen ones were.

Like others have said, I'm not as concerned by it being horse as I am by it being not what is on the label and potentially not fit for human consumption. Will it stop me eating them? I'll probably think thrice instead of twice the next time the situation arises, and we'll probably go for chicken instead not that I'm truly convinced that is safe.

I also have to admit that I am concerned about the not processed/minimally processed meat we eat. We don't eat much meat for both health and cost reasons, but we do eat some and what we do eat tends to be the lower end of what is available at the supermarket. I was crushed to discover that the chicken breasts I was buying didn't JUST have water added--I don't mind water but the other stuff means we'll have to find another alternative. I do my best to buy whole chickens but I have to balance between saving time and frugality. We also buy a pack of mince on average around once a month. We get it from Aldi but I feel less certain of it now. Any other meat we eat is a yellow sticker find when we do venture into the big 5 which isn't often as we can't afford them. I would love to purchase from the local butchers but we simply do not have the money for it. Our income is very small as we're both full time students in terminal degrees. While my OH has funding, I do not, and as an immigrant my fees and costs are much higher. Unfortunately my very careful budgeting back in 2007 for my degree was thrown out of the water by extremely high food inflation and a long illness which extended my degree course by over a year. That is to say--this is a long term frugal lifestyle for us and simply cutting out food for the sake of my ideals isn't an option right now. I'm not really sure what next week's meal plan will look like now. Five days are usually meat free, bulked out with lentils and beans and sometimes cheese. I may try to incorporate more fish. We're both active with healthy appetites and trying to fill us up on a vegetarian diet without adding in too much fat was getting too expensive.:eek:

Of course, I understand that none of us pays the true cost of our food. I've just had to come to terms with doing the best I can in the circumstances and this has just made that even harder.:(