Will it stop you buying frozen ready meals

VJsmum

kittie wrote: »

added rats, cats, dogs, once mushed they will all look the same. This `scare` is only the tip of the iceberg. Fish from vietnam is next

I think you're right and will watch with interest regarding other revelations. I don't eat Vietnamese fish either.

I buy the odd pizza and some veggie ready meals for DD as she is the fussiest vegetarian I ever met - the range of vegetables she won't eat is astonishing and rather limiting so it is useful to have the odd Linda McC thing in. I buy burgers from the butchers - I used to make them with a burger press but DS prefers what the butchers make and I know where my butchers source everything. I rather think their trade will be picking up now!

Cheapskate

We have a butcher in our village, who can trace every piece of meat he sells, makes his own sausages (and willing to tell you what's in them), cooks his own joints to sell as cooked meat and sells pies made by the local farm shop. Said farm shop cooks its own animals in said pies, no additives except seasoning, so very short shelf life and a bit dear but only buy now and then - I'm happy with what I get from both places, and realise we're very lucky to have these locally. Usually do a roaring trade, but both have said business is def up since Christmas!

A xo

Butterfly_Brain

I haven't bought ready meals or burgers since the BSE scare, I now make my own burgers, chicken nuggets and batch cook my own ready meals, I do buy meat from Aldi because it has the red tractor on it (But it makes me wonder is that actually a good bench mark, if they can lie about what goes into the ready meals they can lie about red tractors.) and I buy as much meat as I can from the butcher but that depends on how much we have to spend.

Not only are they pumping our food with, high fat, sugars chemicals, antibiotics and growth hormones (Obesity epidemic?)
Read this,,,,,,,,,, guaranteed to make you spit feathers :mad::mad::mad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/09/british-sugar-giant-tax-scandal

katieclampet

Honey_Bear wrote: »

Rant Alert!

I am sick to death of paying regulators who don't do their jobs. The Financial Services Mob allowed the banks to do things that were, at best, seriously iffy like the Libor issue. Shropshire health authority and their auditors didn't lift a finger while patients were dying needlessly- and don't tell me no-one complained to their MPs about lack of care in those hospitals - I used to manage a hospital complaints department and everyone knew where the problems were. (They were tackled.) The Care and Quality Commission allowed the scandalous lack of care to continue at a residential home for adults with learning difficulties and the Food Standards mob apparently think that all they should have done is read the labels. Why, for goodness sake, do I as a tax payer have to pay these leech's salaries for not doing their jobs? They're working hard at the moment thinking about whether something with fat in it should be flagged up as fattening, but not apparently bothered about no-one actually checking that what it says on the tin in actually in the tin.

As to ready meals - I can't afford them because I'm too busy trying to make a living to pay tax for the government to pay people not to do their jobs.

Rant over.

Couldnt agree more!

As with most posters, its not so much eating horse meat that is an issue to me (although its not something I would chose to eat) it is the fact that food has been sold & misrepresented.

I heard on the radio that apparantly it is a "criminal conspiarcy," with links to the M*fia!

So nothing to do with selling the cheapest meat for the most profit then!

katie

heavenleigh

I was in the co-op earlier to get some veg and noticed their fresh 'finest' beef lasagne's well in date reduced from £3.75 to 5p, needless to say a grabbed a few to stick in the freezer for lazy nights. At least i know they may contain horse, and for that price i don't care!

ALIBOBSY

Softstuff wrote: »

I don't eat ready meals, mostly since in Australia they're ridiculously priced. As regards horsemeat I'd eat that, frankly though there isn't much meat-wise I wouldn't eat. It should indeed have been labelled as such.

What I don't get though is why someone would pass off horsemeat as beef. The only possible reason would be that horsemeat is cheaper, but as a vet friend says horses are very temperamental healthwise and hard to keep healthy, and I would have thought have less meat on them, so surely beef is cheaper to produce?

These will not have been animals kept and bred or food. My understanding is there has already been issues in the past few years about large turnover of animals in the US horse racing buisiness. After a few years of being injected with god knows what-some legal some not, pretty much all not suitable for human consumption, they are shipped straight to the slaughter houses to avoid further feeding costs once they are no longer money makers at the track.

They are supposed to be held for 6 months before being sent for slaughter, but thats alot of feed and care costs for no profit, so many "get around" the rules. These mostly end up in slaughter houses in Canada and even more so Mexico. Now the US have pushed Canada to examine papers more carefully, but Mexico? TBH even 6 months wait doesn't mean the meat suddenly is safe. This meat is ground up and shipped as mince mostly and is very cheap. I suspect the intent was originally for it to go for pet food, but somewhere along the line people decided it could go for human food and later it was realised you could vastly increase profits by labelling it as beef mince-I read somewhere it was a 6 fold increase. My understanding is other cheap sources of horsemeat are in some eastern countries such as Romania.

At those sort of levels its probably better profits than most drugs and alot less risky, clearly some kind of organised fraud/crime is involved.

TBH I can't recall the last time I bought a frozen ready meal, but occasionally when I was too ill to cook for the family or short on time we might get a chilled ready meal. I already mostly cook from scratch and make my own burgers and meatballs, I have moved away from buying supermarket meats to using my local farm shops/butchers and this just makes me even more determined to avoid the big boys.

Its funny though a few years ago I worked at Asda when they had been taken over by walmart. They decided to save money to phase out the proper time served butchers they had on site and for the meat to be brought in already prepacked and I recall chatting to the last butcher to leave-he was doing other jobs as they gave him 6 months on his higher wage doing other work and he was waiting to start work in a local butchers. He said the quality of the prepacked stuff was terrible and he would be ashamed to serve it so he dreaded to think what was in the ready meals.

I hope this gets people to try local butchers/farm shops and realise as I did that you can get much, much higher quality and better taste/texture meat for either the same price or CHEAPER than the supermarket cheapo stuff. I can get higher welfare beef or free range pork and chicken for a fraction of what the supermarkets sell it for, its all locally produced and in fact you can see the animals in the fields. I know I am lucky in this availability, but I reckon many will be able to access a good butchers locally if they try-have seen a recent newstory where local butchers were getting rapidly climbing numbers of people coming in for they products-especially beefburgers and the like.

Maybe this alongside other recent issues regarding pricing and the like, may have a great side effect in that more people realise what a rip off the big stores are and move back to local produces/stores.

Ali x

ALIBOBSY

Seems to be alot of companies now looking to test their own products before the Gov get to them, scarily this includes cow and gate, but hopefully they are just being cautious because its baby food-makes me glad I rarely bought jars and made my own "baby food" when weaning, although they all loved heinz's chocolate pudding.

I am a bit annoyed that Labour are immediately trying to make this about coalition cuts, this is clearly an international large scale scam and no doubt has gone on for years and years. Given that prior to the cuts ie under Lab trading standards weren't testing for horsemeat how they can blame the cuts is beyond me. ANY party trying to make polictical gains out of a major issue like this are almost as low as those that sold the dodgy meat. This crosses party lines and should be an issue for all sides to push to get sorted.

Ali x

FatVonD

The most upsetting thing for me is the amount of food that's been recalled that will go to waste, I'd far rather have seen it relabelled 'make contain horse meat' and sold off cheaply, I'd have bought it.

The cows (and the horses too for that matter) that provided the beef that was cut with the horsemeat probably led miserable lives and got killed only to end up in landfill.

firsttimetom

FatVonD wrote: »

The most upsetting thing for me is the amount of food that's been recalled that will go to waste, I'd far rather have seen it relabelled 'make contain horse meat' and sold off cheaply, I'd have bought it.

The cows (and the horses too for that matter) that provided the beef that was cut with the horsemeat probably led miserable lives and got killed only to end up in landfill.

I think the worry with that though is that the Horses were allegedly introduced into food chain by criminals, and as such they probably weren't raised to be eaten, and could contain alls sorts of drugs.

Of course, it could just be the supermarkets have been rumbled and are trying to pin the blame elsewhere.

gailey_2

"Comigel claims it sourced its meat from Romania, which has been subjected to export restrictions due to the prevalence of the viral disease equine infectious anaemia in the country."
This detail appears to be the most alarming new factor in this unfolding crisis. If the rendered horse carcasses coming out of Romania are actually diseased and the animals have been treated with drugs for that disease prior to slaughter, we can see why criminal gangs would be able to make an instant profit by selling them as 'beef'. As diseased horse carcasses in Romania they would be worthless, but as 'beef' in the West they suddenly acquire considerable value in the meat processing industry.
Is the rendered horse meat that's been found so far in supermarket products the remains of the diseased horses officially banned from export from Romania? If so, Owen Paterson's assertions about food safety are not only misleading, they are wilfully negligent and putting the public at needless further risk.


From reading this I would say the aldi/findus ready meals do pose a risk as diseased and drug ridden.

we dont know how its liked to irish burgers and involves a few countries now.