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MP calls for ban on EU meat products


Frederick
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I think the whole way we eat is peculiar. I was quite shocked when I went with my 3 year old grand daughter to see a live performance of The Gruffalo (only an hour long) and lots of the mothers around me produced sandwiches and bananas to keep their little ones going.

A sure sign of aging I reckon.

Hoddy

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Reading the BBC news there seems to by two things going on. The first is who supplied the meat. Findus had the meals made for them by Comigel who in turn whent to a company called Spanghero. Secondly there is to be added in the 'agents' who sourced the meat. Spanghero went to and agent in Cyprus who then placed and order with an agent in the Netherlands who in turn placed an order with an abattoir in Romania. In this chain each person, agent or company made a profit totalling around €300,000. My guess s that Findus set the price they would pay and as this all moved down the line and everyone took their cut there wasn't enough money for the Romania abattoir to pay for beef so they used horse instead.

The French supermarkets Carrefour, Monoprix, Auchan, Casino, Cora and Picard have all withdrawn product.

In the article it also says that the first use of horse meat in product was in August 2012.

To my mind they are all to blame (not just those nasty Eastern Europeans) and they were all driven by greed and I don't think it would have made much of a difference if the EU existed or not. A Duane in France when he or she checks a container reads the packing note that says beef, looks and sees meat, puts their stamp on the documents and off goes the lorry.

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[quote user="Hoddy"]I will admit to having a bee in my bonnet about the loss of Home Economics. It wasn't just learning about food groups, and the importance each of them has and simple and appropriate cooking methods. Also, and almost equally important, was basic hygiene. This was particularly true in our school which always had over 40% of children from ethnic minorities many of whom thought that running a cold tap on a plate for a long time rendered it clean and that it was OK to pour melted fat down the sink. Hoddy[/quote]

 

Then, under the educational reforms of the Labour Government, it turned into Food Technology where students did really useful things like design packaging for a food product, or think about how it could be marketed.  Nothing about how to cook the stuff

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But they DID do cooking! I know, because I had to supply ingredients and eat the resultant concoctions! And that was Food Technology. So, unless it's changed again, drastically, there's cooking going on.

And I may be wrong, but I do seem to remember that in my own youth, it was only girlies that did domestic science, while boys learned how to make a bookend or how to wire a plug. At least it would appear that in more recent times the playing field was leveled to ensure that both sexes could learn some (however rudimentary) cooking skills.

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[quote user="Quillan"]

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Its the same with these meals. We can buy a fresh made lasagna from the supermarket that feeds four for about 3 Euros. [/quote]

That sums up what the problem is all about. If you buy cheap junk you must not be surprised at what's inside. The only way to get more goodness out of that meal is to eat the packaging.

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The introduction of Food Technology was part of the Thatcher reforms. They wanted to give the kids skills that would make them more employable so the kids who did Food Technology were supposed to be going into the food industry. This is why they did packaging and such like. This was completely different from the Home Economics and Domestic Science it replaced. The clue s in the name. If you were going to make a career in food we required a good pass in Chemistry to be able to take it at A level.

All our children including the boys did Home Ec. - given our intake this was the thing that caused us most problems although some of returning students did thank the staff when they came back because they were able to cope with student living better than they would have been able to.
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[quote user="Ivor Nidea"][quote user="Quillan"]

.

Its the same with these meals. We can buy a fresh made lasagna from the supermarket that feeds four for about 3 Euros. [/quote]

That sums up what the problem is all about. If you buy cheap junk you must not be surprised at what's inside. The only way to get more goodness out of that meal is to eat the packaging.

[/quote]

Yes and I accept that although it should say exactly whats in the food on the packaging. If you buy fresh sausages, even if their made on the premises unless you stand over the person making them, inspect and test everything that goes in them you don't have a clue. You are totally reliant on what the person making them tells you are in them. If you put a pile of fresh minced beef alongside a pile of fresh minced horse I suspect around 90% of the population would think they are the same.

As to saying it is junk well how do actually know. In your mind, just like some others, if it is ready made then it must be junk. Here's a thing, I wonder if when your in the UK you eat in pubs and specifically look for pubs offering home cooked meals? You might be surprised to know that in many of these pubs the food arrives as frozen ready made. The pub buys or rents the cooking containers so the frozen meals fit exactly, they shove the meal, still frozen, in the container and put it in the oven for the prescribed time. There is nothing illegal about it because it is cooked in the pub. I think is was Grand Metropolitan or one of their subsidiaries that came up with the idea 30 or more years ago. All the pub chains they owned were managed houses (Truman, Watney's, Samuel Websters, Ushers and restaurants like Berni Inns) they all used pre made meals and nothing has changed for them. Other pub groups (Bass, Courage, Sam Smiths, John Smiths etc) followed and did the same thing because they needed to be competitive.

You may also be horrified to know that many French restaurants buy pre made meals from the wholesalers, I have seen them do it when we used to use them to buy our stuff (not meals nor sauces I hasten to add, bedroom supplies). Some from companies like Picard even come on a china plate which you wash and return after use. I was quite surprised to see quite a few of the local restaurant owners, amongst others from further afield, buy haricot beans, steak sauces etc in massive catering tins. They even sell or rent you the dispenser for getting the sauce out of the tin. Many of the average star hotels use these sauces. To carry your frozen meals home you rent a special container that when you go back to the wholesaler you drop off and pick a 'charged one up outside to put your new stock in and it plugs in to the 12V socket in you car or van. Paella is another down on the coast. One assumes just because there is a fishing boat moored opposite that the paella is fresh caught when quite often it isn't but is bought from a wholesaler pre made.

The only way you can absolutely guaranteed what you are eating is only to eat at home, never a restaurant, pub, bar or snack bar, and source then cook everything your self even sausages. Even then if you don't grow the veg and have your own animals you don't know what they have been sprayed with or injected with.

At the end of the day the majority of the poplation can't do any of this so they have to rely on whats on the box be it fresh or frozen and hope that the people selling it are honest. When you buy fresh veg from the market, be it organic or not how do you know it is, you only have the word of the person selling it, it could have been sprayed with all sorts of chemicals then washed before sale. What this has done is to destroy trust amongst the consumers, not just with Findus but every type of food but we are so reliant on the suppliers we have no choice but to buy it.

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On the question of pub grub I am well aware of the differences between "Home cooked" - "Home prepared" and "Home made". I don't have specific personal knowledge of food preparation sold commercially but a family member has worked for many years in pubs and restaurants in the UK and in various other countries, and indeed on big private boats. So I have inevitably been made aware of practices, some dubious ones, that exist in the preparation and cooking of food for public consumption. So, based on that, I would not surprised at anything that went on in the production of food for profit.

I quite take the point that we have to take it at face value as to what is inside a ready-made meal, sausage or meat pie. I think it's standard practice to refer to cheap pies, the sort of thing bought for example at sporting events, as being filled with lips and nostrils, or maybe it's just the kind of places I frequented. By and large provided the pie or meal doesn't kill you there is nothing wrong (imho) in slumming it a bit on the odd occasion. Where I do have issue is where it is part of a normal diet and expecting a meal for 4 people costing 3 euros to be a healthy nutritional diet. I am not suggesting for one minute this applies to you Quillan but the one example I saw on a news programme gave the impression it was a normal diet. I imagine for that one family it could be replicated by many.

A big problem as I see it is that issues such as the ready-made frozen meal begins as being a one-off in a busy, or can't be bothered scenario, then over the years becomes standard practice. Then with the ever increasing climb in sales so the search for ways of cutting the base price in order to compete with the competition.

Maybe it's all part of a big picture with obesity and the alarming lack of fitness with young people. Once upon a time you could buy a bag of crisps for a threepenny joey, I wouldn't mind betting that small bag of crisps would be looked at with some derision nowadays by somebody tucking into their family bag. 

As a final point, in my time I have eaten the odd kebab carved off something that resembles a severed limb but I don't even like to think what they are constructed of.

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 Taken from HABITAT FOR HORSES    US publication on drugs in horse meat headed   "What they don,t want you to know  " 

http://www.habitatforhorses.org/horsemeat-and-drugs/     If you want to read all the drug stuff  .. If you have got all day !

In first place, there is not a established withdrawal period for many of substances commonly used to treat equine ailments (notably phenylbutazone plus those included in Table II of European Commission (EU) Regulation No. 37/2010) since these build up in equine tissues and never completely leave the body system, therefore not being possible to establish MRLs. This is implies that no matter how much time elapses between the last dose and slaughter, the toxic compounds will remain in the meat and, eventually, be transferred up the food chain, accumulating on its upper links (i.e. in people), where they can therefore break havoc.

Second, although withdrawal periods and assorted mechanisms to prevent banned substances from reaching the consumer’s plate have in place in the European Union since 1996 (at least on paper), such mechanisms are a novelty when it comes to American horsemeat exports, assuming they are actually implemented as intended by Brussels, as will be set forth later. The six-month withdrawal period required by EU legislation on substances included in Regulation No. 1950/2006 was not fully implemented by Canadian and Mexican authorities until early 2010 (coming finally into effect on July 31 2010), several months after they were officially requested to do so by the European Commission’s Health and Consumers Directorate General Food and Veterinary Office (DG-SANCO FVO) in a letter sent to all countries not belonging to the European Union that were exporting horsemeat into it, following a series of audits (such as Mexico’s 2008 audit, discovering an unsettling number of critical traceability, hygiene and drug residue / microbiological monitoring program deficiencies) revealing that the majority of third countries, if not all, exporting horsemeat into the EU authorize or tolerate the administration to horses of substances explicitly prohibited or not allowed for use in horses intended for slaughter for human food and that neither veterinary treatment records are kept (so as to enable the eventual recall of a batch of contaminated horsemeat upon revision of the drug treatment records) nor there are any system in place to separate horses intended for slaughter (which must never be given any banned substance and observe the 180-day withdrawal period for the rest of drugs listed in Regulation No. 1950/2006) and the rest of equines not intended for slaughter, which are understood to never be allowed to enter the food chain as they are administered banned substances that are of usual, if not virtually necessary, use in common horse husbandry practices. Said audits raised concerns amongst the FVO’s inspection unit at Grange, Ireland, that horsemeat being sold in shops across Europe could be potentially contaminated with dangerous chemicals posing a significant danger to the population and therefore requiring exporting third countries to adopt corrective measures bringing their regulations in line with EU’s ones as regards to traceability, treatment record keeping, banned substance usage and segregation of equines treated with them.

This means that, for decades, thousands of people in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and several other countries have been secretly fed contaminated, poisonous meat without neither European nor local production authorities (i.e. American, Canadian and Mexican ones) doing a single thing to prevent it. The situation was much more direr back in the 80’s and the 90’s, when the European Union was still pretty much in the drawing board and the horse slaughter plants only had to deal directly with the Belgian custom authorities and the primitive, easily rigged paperwork controls it carried out. It is not difficult to imagine how the Belgian Ministry of Agriculture cleared these imports of any serious testing thorough a sketchy “collaboration agreement” with USDA or similar bureaucratic artifice to further national economic interests and gaining the favor of the deep pockets of the horsemeat cartel.

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At the weekend I bought 5lbs of  lean mince from our local butcher, 4 of us had generous portions of chilli last night and I have frozen another 5 portions - thats 9 meals for under £20 (including all the other ingredients) and I could have made smaller portions easily.......

Frankly if I was  buying some of these cheap ready meals or seeing roast dinners at bargain prices in pubs I really wonder where the meat comes from and have done for a long time. I see no great problem eating horse as long as its not labelled something else and hasn't been treated with banned drugs 

Oh and by the way Q, I'm not retired ...there is not much extra time involved in cooking in bulk.

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[quote user="Ivor Nidea"]

A big problem as I see it is that issues such as the ready-made frozen meal begins as being a one-off in a busy, or can't be bothered scenario, then over the years becomes standard practice. Then with the ever increasing climb in sales so the search for ways of cutting the base price in order to compete with the competition.

Maybe it's all part of a big picture with obesity and the alarming lack of fitness with young people. Once upon a time you could buy a bag of crisps for a threepenny joey, I wouldn't mind betting that small bag of crisps would be looked at with some derision nowadays by somebody tucking into their family bag. 

As a final point, in my time I have eaten the odd kebab carved off something that resembles a severed limb but I don't even like to think what they are constructed of.

[/quote]

Funny enough there are more diet ready made meals for Weight Watchers and more recently Dr Dukan than there are 'normal' ready made meals judging by what I see when I walk round the super market.

Perhaps it is because I am male and every woman knows we can't multi task, or so I am told. Last night I cooked a four course meal for eight people, all fresh ingredients I might add. Today, Mrs 'Q' is back in London for three months working, I have four rooms to clean, all the laundry, drying it inside as it is too cold outside, ironing etc and I was going to have braised steak for dinner. Problem is guests leaving, me taking their money (that's the best bit) and then the cleaning ready for more guests arriving tonight meant the steak didn't get prepped and in the oven so today it's beef burgers (thrown in the 'boxers' grilling machine thing) and a couple of handfuls of frozen chip and cold backed beans which takes me all of ten minutes (while I am typing this). I shall try and prep the steak tonight and let it marinade over night and throw it in the oven about 6:30 tomorrow morning when I get up. When I finish work all I seem to want to do these days is sleep but I can't always do that as there always seems like there is something else needing doing.

When I die I hope there is reincarnation as I want to come back as a women. Far less stress as they seem to do all these things plus bring up children and do the cooking standing on their heads and still have time to go get their hair done once a week. OK there is the pain of childbirth bit but I hear you can get a zipper fitted these days as many women prefer cesarean birth. [;-)] (only kidding ladies).

There goes the bell, dinner is ready.

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[quote user="Ivor Nidea"]

I hope that your guests eating steak don't mistake the grill marks for jockey's whip markings. Are you going for the Clydesdale, Percheron, or for the client watching their weight, the Shetland?

It's all said in the best possible taste[:)]

[/quote]

Steak for the punters, oh no, far to expensive, that's for me. [;-)] It was chicken last night with a wonderful white wine sauce. It was French wine so I don't have a clue whats in it. [;-)]

I have however been having this strange urge to gallop round the garden. It first manifested it's self back in August and seems to be getting stronger. I also seem to be fascinated by those big rolls of hay you see in fields all wrapped up in black plastic. I could sit and stare at them for hours. [+o(]

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In the great scheme of things finding Phenylbutazone in a burger (imho) is just a tiny drop in the ocean. For many years I have wondered about the effects of the escalation of drug taking, apart from anti-biotics, swilling about in the human system then ultimately being passed  into the water we drink. I read something years ago that a glass of water from the tap had been passed through the human system 6 times. In our family we (well it was me that actually started it off) used to joke about having a glass of Mrs ***** s water, after an old lady who lived opposite. I can still picture her bent double in her garden legs akimbo and showing what she had for breakfast.
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[quote user="Ivor Nidea"] I read something years ago that a glass of water from the tap had been passed through the human system 6 times. [/quote]

Good Heavens! It's enough to put you off homeopathy.

[quote user="Quillan"] So they found Bute in some of the horse meat, big deal. After reading the link I can see no immediate harm to the public whatsoever, its just another shoddy attempt to create mass hysteria amongst the public. [/quote]

Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales on BBC Radio today said that "bute" is not an issue. You would need to eat 10,000 horseburgers a day before there was a sufficient concentration of the drug to have any effect.

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