Processed meat - Feeling Lucky?

I will not make any equine based jokes:- I believe that the media and twitter have quite exhaustively pursued that course of action. However I would like to talk about the state of the meat packing and processing industries in 2013. Since the BSE scandal of the mid 1990s the UK has had the most radical overhaul of the aforementioned industries in the world. Our meat should be perfect and flawless. Yet according to the news of the past few weeks (Burgergate – which involved Tesco, Aldi, Waitrose, Buger King and more) and the revelation yesterday that Findus frozen lasagnes have contained up to 100% horse meat, it is patently obvious that the processed meat industry is actually a shadowy world of borrowed sinews, animal derived filler powder and mechanically recovered circus animal parts.  

“Nothing wrong with a bit of horse, mate. It won’t kill you. Why does the Anglosphere hate on eating horsemeat. Every other country does.” The people that say that (of which there are more than a few) have gotten the wrong end of the stick completely. The labels say “beef”, not “horse”. I personally don’t mind eating horse. I have eaten it on many an occasion when abroad and rather liked it. But I would like it to be my decision to buy it, not an unscrupulous greedy meat packing plant owner. And other people object to it too. The issue is that the products became tainted in the first place amidst our robust and second to none regularity system. I use that word ‘tainted’ specifically, as I believe that something that wasn’t intended or suspected to be in a product is technically a ‘taint’. So apparently all the food companies have to do is to import dodgy meat from abroad or partially prepare their products there and the fantastic regulatory system is neatly bypassed. I do wonder how much of the blame will stick to the UK household names and how much will fall on the Eastern-European slaughterhouses that reportedly supply us with crumbling foetid flesh.

Of course, the horses that have reached the end of their life and are in pain from crippling arthritis get pumped full of the anti-inflammatory chemical Phenylbutazone (otherwise known as ‘bute’ – I love how horse medicine has street names). This is possibly a bigger deal if this has entered the food change as it can be toxic to humans. But who knows that was in the horses systems?

Clearly there is now a crisis of confidence in the supermarkets and the wider industry. How do you know your frozen fish-fingers aren’t tainted with sea horses or those scary deep sea fish that have lanterns instead of eyebrows? There needs to be a root and branch review of the whole processed food sector and executives need to go to jail before people will be convinced that it is safe to eat their cheap processed food again.