The End of the Frozen Food Revolution

Although I am on a diet, I had a great big dirty Chinese takeaway last night. It was glorious. I really really like Chinese food, however I am under no illusion as to the general quality of your average takeaway. I go to one fairly close to my house and the food has always been good and I have never been ill, however when I was making my selection at home with the menu before I popped out to collect it, it found myself shying away from the beef and lamb dishes. I love beef in Chinese dishes. Literally, all of them. But you have to ask yourself the question, where do they get their beef from? If Waitrose have been hornswoggled over having pork in their beef meatballs then what chance does the local Chinese takeaway that buys in bulk from grotty wholesalers have?

Then that got me thinking. What about the frozen pizza in the freezer. The one with ‘spicy beef’ on it? Now, without using a DNA sequencer myself, how am I to know that the food isn’t tainted?  All these thoughts swirled around my mind as I picked up my Chinese chicken curry, egg fried rice, vegetable spring rolls, and crispy fried chicken with Peking sauce. Nothing can be relied upon now, well, at least, in my own mind it can’t be. This horsemeat scandal will change the supermarket dynamics completely as the cheap frozen meals that people buy will no longer be supplied under a ‘ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies’ type of deal. The questions have been asked and the lies have been told. This means that frozen food prices will skyrocket to take into consideration of the ‘extra’ (which should have been in place anyway) due diligence that the supermarkets and end processors will have to take. If this is the case, then no one will buy them, as the people who rely on them won’t buy them as they won’t be able to afford it, and the people that don’t buy them anyway – well nothing will change there as well. So will it bring about the end of the frozen food revolution which started in the 70s until now? I hope so. 

They Workfare for you

The government’s highly divisive ‘Workfare’ scheme was been given the bum’s rush by the Courts on Appeal yesterday. The court reckon that the government will have to pay back all the people it took off income support and JSA because they didn’t particularly want to “slaves” and work 40 odd hours a week for nothing. Nada. Zip. Except, it wasn’t for nothing. It was for the JSA. So they were getting that, but the issue was that this didn’t constitute the minimum wage. But then they weren’t WORKING working, just working in a scheme. It’s all a bit confusing as to what the reality of the situation is.

If the companies involved were sacking or laying off their normal salaried staff in favour of getting people to work for them for free then that is wrong and they should have their wrists slapped or possibly cut. If they were genuinely offering a chance to keep the people on the scheme out of bed and contributing in a work environment then that is a good thing. I have been unemployed and had to take out JSA when I left university – they didn’t have this scheme then but as long as I wasn’t out of pocket or travelling for miles then I would have done it. Mind you, the fortnightly interviews down the job centre were pretty horrific so maybe not. The point is that you lose the work mindset pretty quickly. I even get it when I’m on holiday for more than a few weeks. My mind goes sludgy and I can’t wake up even for delicious pancakes for breakfast. But that is just me.

Although I am generally in favour of the scheme, I can’t help but think about the situation in the US where prisoners are forced to work for pennies to build and manufacture things and they genuinely are an alternative cheap workforce that are deliberately put to tender against other companies and almost always win. As long as there is safeguards in place to prevent abuse then I don’t see what the fuss is. 

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.