Horsemeat

Scotsman said:
UK abbatoir shut down in horse meat scandal

A UK slaughterhouse suspected of deliberately mis-selling horsemeat as beef was shut down on Tuesday as the contamination scandal escalated.

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A BRITISH slaughterhouse and a meat processing plant were shut down yesterday under suspicion that horsemeat was sold as beef for kebabs and burgers.

The latest development in the food contamination scandal came after Food Standards Agency (FSA) officials and police raided the premises in West Yorkshire and Wales. They closed down Peter Boddy Licensed Slaughterhouse in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, after inspections suggested the firm had supplied horse carcases for use in products said to contain only beef.

Officials also visited a Welsh farm, Farmbox Meats, in Llandre, Aberystwyth, which has been ordered to suspend operations.

The FSA has seized all meat found and paperwork, including customer lists from both companies, and a police investigation is under way.

The raids coincided with the publication of a poll yesterday that showed one in three people has already been put off buying meat-based ready meals since contamination was first discovered a month ago.

The Kantar survey of 6,000 consumers revealed that just over a third (36 per cent) were less likely to buy processed meat as a result of the growing revelations over contaminated products.

Although a further third said the issue would not make any difference to their weekly shop, about one in ten (13 per cent) said they would switch to more locally sourced meat in future, while 5 per cent were cutting down on meat altogether.

Speaking after yesterday’s raids, Andrew Rhodes, FSA director of operations, said the agency had ordered an audit of abattoirs in the UK after the horsemeat issue first came to light last month.

“I have suspended both plants immediately while our investigations continue,” he added.

It is the first indication that possible fraud in the escalating horsemeat scandal has been committed not just in mainland Europe, but in the UK too.

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson described the case as “absolutely shocking”.

Mr Paterson said: “It’s totally un*acceptable if any business in the UK is defrauding the public by passing off horsemeat as beef. I expect the full force of the law to be brought down on anyone involved in this kind of activity.”

There were also fears raised yesterday that some lamb pro*ducts may have been contaminated. The Food Standards Agency stressed there was “no evidence” of that yet, but said further testing would be carried out ifnecessary.

The developments came as ministers in Scotland launched a £1 million campaign to help restore public confidence in Scottish beef, lamb and pork. The funding from the Scottish Government will support and develop new markets at home and abroad for Scottish meat. It will also fund a study across the meat sector to assess the market and determine what is on sale and which retailers provide the best support for producers.

Kantar’s poll appears to confirm growing concerns that the horsemeat allegations will do lasting harm to the industry.

A spokesman said:“One-third of us are less likely to buy pro*cessed meat due to the horsemeat scandal. We conducted the poll to see the impact of the news that some beef pro*ducts were actually horsemeat. A quarter of people questioned say they don’t buy processed meat anyway, and a further third say it won’t make any difference.

“As the horsemeat scandal continues to rumble on with new revelations almost daily, it will be interesting to see what the medium- and long-term impact is on the purchasing of processed meat in the UK.”

However, supermarkets and other shops disputed the suggestion that many consumers’ shopping lists were changing due to the scandal.

Scottish Retail Consortium spokesman Richard Dodd said yesterday: “What our members are telling us is that they are not seeing any significant change in customer buying habits. There have been no big switches from one category of meat product to another. There has been a bit more interest in fresh burgers, as opposed to frozen ones.

“Clearly, we’re very keen that customers recognise the enormous effort retailers are putting in to demonstrate that their products are what retailers and customers expect them to be.”

He added that the retailsector was taking “huge” steps to address the issues, with the results of tests on thousands of processed beef products – analysis ordered by ministers after up to 100 per cent horsemeat was detected in Findus lasagne – due on Friday.

A spokeswoman for the Food Standards Agency Scotland, which is leading the audit of 229 factories north of the Border, said testing would be extended if there were grounds to do so. She said: “We have no evidence to suggest horsemeat is being used in lamb products, but it may be credible.

“If we do find evidence to suggest that could be the case, then we would be looking at it.”

In another move yesterday,Supermarket chain Waitroseannounced it was pulling a range of beef meatballs after tests revealed that they might contain pork.

A spokesman said the result of tests on the 480g packs of frozen Essential Waitrose Meatballs had been contradictory, but that it was removing them from sale as a precaution. “We have discovered that in two batches of our frozen meatballs produced last summer, some of the meatballs may contain some pork,” he said.

“Several tests have been done on this product, and even though the results have been contradictory, we have taken the precautionary action of removing the frozen meatballs from sale and putting up customer information notices in all our branches.

“The meatballs are safe to eat, but pork is not listed as aningredient and should not be part of the recipe.”

Only 480g packs of 16 meatballs labelled as Best Before End June 2013 and August 2013 were affected, he added.

Meanwhile, the National Beef Association (NBA) has suggested the addition of the words “United Kingdom origin” to packaging to prevent “further cheating” by suppliers on the continent.

The scandal has spread all over Europe, as details of the elaborate supply chain in the meat industry emerge.

French consumer safety authorities said companies from Romania, Cyprus and the Netherlands, as well as its own firms, were involved.

Romanian authorities have confirmed they are investigating, while their Dutch counterparts said they were ready to do so if necessary.
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Oh dear.

I don't think this will be the end of it somehow.
 
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Scotsman said:
Harmful ‘bute’ drug found in UK abattoir horses

The horse painkiller ‘bute’, which is potentially harmful to humans, has been found in eight horse carcasses from UK abattoirs, the Food Standards Agency said today.

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• Food Standards Agency find traces of harmful painkiller in UK horse carcasses

• Bute has not been found in any Findus products after tests

• Scottish chef Nick Nairn urges authorities to ‘come clean’


Six of the eight affected horse carcasses were slaughtered by LJ Potter Partners at Stillman’s (Somerset) Ltd in Taunton, Somerset, and sent to France where Food Standard Agency officials warned they “may have entered the food chain”.


The remaining two were slaughtered at High Peak Meat Exports Ltd in Nantwich, Cheshire, where they have been destroyed.


FSA officials stressed that the tests only found traces of the drug and the health risk to anyone who has eaten contaminated meat was very low.


Further test results announced today showed that bute had not been found in Findus food products, which were removed from sale after they were found to contain up to 100 per cent horsemeat.


The results came as Scottish celebrity chef Nick Nairn called on authorities to ‘come clean’ about what is in school dinners after a Glasgow factory was implicated in the contamination scandal.


Nairn called for more work to reassure the public after Waitrose named the Freshlink plant as the source of beef meatballs which it fears may contain pork, something the factory denies.
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Free drugs with your horse!
 
Even in school dinners now?

Wonder how far it'll actually go. Might be more horsemeat flying around the foodchain than cowmeat.
 
Sky News Newsdesk ‏@SkyNewsBreak

French Government says that meat company Spanghero knowingly sold on horsemeat labelled as beef
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Well... that's quite surprising.
 
[TW]Fox;23717044 said:
Internet rumour - the FSA are saying no evidence of that.
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That's the whole point - there is no evidence, paperwork for the horses. But not that 'we've tested all this stuff and found none', because the traceability of horses is no where near that of beef etc where each has a passport, full vaccination record, and has been signed off by a vet after slaughter.

Because there is no evidence but yet it is known that such drugs are used throughout Europe, it is possible. That's also why they're introducing more tests for things like phenylbute/equipalazone specifically, and we'll know more in May.

Edit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/14/horsemeat-scandal-bute-food-chain
 
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Page last updated at 18:09 GMT, Thursday, 14 February 2013
Arrests in horsemeat investigation


Police investigating alleged horsemeat mislabelling have arrested three men.

Dyfed-Powys Police said two men were held at Farmbox Meats Ltd, of Llandre near Aberystwyth.

A third arrest was made at the Peter Boddy Licensed Slaughterhouse, in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.

The Food Standards Agency suspended operations at both sites after raids at the premises on Tuesday.

BBC © 2013
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Good, there needs to be some massive jail time for this. They need to discourage firms in the future from trying this.
 
Glaucus said:
Good, there needs to be some massive jail time for this. They need to discourage firms in the future from trying this.
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I'm very surprised that you've said this. Why do you think there should be "massive jail time"? I'm assuming it's because of the mis-labelling rather than the fact it's horse as I would have thought you'd be all for eating horse.

Sorry if you've covered this already, haven't been on the forums much recently!
 
When I went for a walk a couple of weeks a go I was actually wondering why there were so many horses about, didn't think they were used for anything these days... how wrong am I! :D
 
Ahleckz said:
I'm very surprised that you've said this. Why do you think there should be "massive jail time"? I'm assuming it's because of the mis-labelling rather than the fact it's horse as I would have thought you'd be all for eating horse.

Sorry if you've covered this already, haven't been on the forums much recently!
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Yep miss labeling.
As you should now I'm all for far stricter labelling rules. The horse meat isn't an issue in itself. It's the blatant and knowen miss labeling.
This is a massive issue. How can you decide what to eat when they can't even get that right, let alone with the rubbish labeling laws we have ATM.

Due to existing laws, you pretty much have no choice but to buy food, you therefore have a right to know what's in it. Labelling laws don't go far enough, but ignoring this. This is a massive criminal case and a huge problem.
 
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This is just the tip of the iceberg though, a few people will get a slap on the wrist then everything will go back to business as usual. I have friends who work in/run companies in the food industry and the stories I have heard over the years would make your toes curl.

Even all the regulations we have now can be just tick box exercises, with multiple known ways of circumventing the regulations that everyone turns a blind eye to, vets, supermarket inspectors etc

And this isn't limited to the meat industry, a simple example with veg - You might want to buy produce grown in the UK, but plenty of times it will be imported in and then just transfered to a package saying 'produce of the UK'
 
No doubt you are outraged about the horse meat scandal. You have every right to be – criminality, profiteering, potential fraud, all have led to many people eating an animal they would probably prefer to see in the 3.20 at Kempton and possibly also ingesting dangerous veterinary drugs. findus

However, I’m going to come at this from another angle and it’s this: it’s your own bloody fault. There you go.

I know, I know; you’re not happy. It’s not your fault is it? It’s the government, the supermarkets, criminals and Goodness knows who else.

But it’s not just them, you see. It’s you.

After a week of this story my patience has finally snapped, and it’s time someone told you a few home truths.

Many of us have been banging on for years about this stuff, trying to make you care about the need for better food labeling, about fairness for farmers, about the need to support local farms to avoid all our food coming from giant, uncaring corporate agri-businesses which churn out cheap product to feed the insatiable appetite of supermarket price-cutting.

We’ve been highlighting the unfairness of UK farmers being forced to meet 73 different regulations to sell to supermarkets which don’t apply to foreign suppliers, and talking about our children growing up with no understanding of food production and, more than all of this, about the way supermarkets have driven down and down and down the cost of meat to the point where people think it’s normal to buy 3lbs of beef (in burgers) for 90p.

And you wouldn’t listen. It was like shouting into a gale.

Through the years of New Labour, when farming and the countryside were demonised, you wouldn’t listen. You cheerfully chose to believe that all farmers were Rolls Royce driving aristocrats, as painted by John Prescott. You had no sympathy. You wanted a chicken for £2 and your Sunday roast for a fiver. Well, you got them didn’t you? And hundreds of farmers went to the wall. And you still didn’t care because Turkey slices were ten for 60p.

And now you’re furious, because it turns out that when you pay peanuts for something it’s actually not very good. Who knew eh?

And before you start, don’t even think about the “it’s all right for the rich who can go to local butcher’s shops but what about the poor?” line. The number of people who can’t afford adequate amounts of food is tiny – tragic and wrong, yes, but tiny. Supermarkets don’t make their billions from them hunting in the “reduced” basket, they make their money from millions of everyday folk filling a weekly trolley. You, in other words.

Until the mid 1990s, Britain was also full of good local abattoirs. They were run by people who knew the local farmers who used them, and the local butchers which sold the meat. They were closed in their hundreds by new health and safety regulations which made it impossible for small abattoirs to compete with giant companies doing the job more cheaply.

We tried to tell you, you didn’t care.

And of course, unlike the previous generation you were “too busy” to actually cook. You were so busy that the idea of making a meal, then making two more out of the left-overs, was like something from Cider With Rosie to you. You bought a meal every night. And so it had to be cheap.

We tried to tell you. You just pointed out that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall went to Eton and sneered at us.

Cheap rearing abroad. You didn’t care. Cheap slaughtering by machine. You didn’t care. Cheap meat full of crap and off-cuts. You didn’t care. Frozen blocks of meat off-cuts from the abattoir floor being trucked in from Poland to ensure your pack of mince was cheap enough. You didn’t care. In fact you didn’t know, but that’s because you didn’t care.

But we cared. We kept trying to tell you. We launched campaigns, we wrote letters, we raised funds for adverts. Nobody knows what they’re eating anymore, we said. Nobody recognises how hard it is for farmers here to produce quality meat at a price they can sell because of the supermarkets.

And you didn’t care.

Well, now you know you’ve been munching on Dobbin and his various nasty drugs, possibly for years. And now you care.

And yes, you’ve been misled, cheated, lied to. But you must also take some of the responsibility. You didn’t tell supermarkets you wanted quality, you just watched the ads which said “175 products cheaper at Asda this week than Tesco” and went to Asda. You made the market they sold in to, you set their priorities. They gave you what you wanted.

So what will you do now? Now that you care.

How about this…

Rather than just moaning at MPs why not actually think about what you eat, what you buy, where it comes from? Why not visit a farm on an open day? Take the kids, show them where their food comes from. If it’s a good farm, why not try to use your consumer power accordingly to make more farms that way? To make them viable. Why not have a think about how you could make meat go further without spending more, through cooking, and thus be able to buy good, British, assured quality meat? 46260_OpenFarmLogo

If you do that, I’ll stop blaming you, and some good may come of all of this.

The culprits responsible for all this will be found, and no doubt tried and hopefully convicted. With luck new rules will be introduced to make a repeat harder. But the market will find a way – it always does. So long as there is a demand for vast quantities of ultra-cheap meat, people will find a way to supply it. So long as people remain uninterested in where their food comes from and how it’s made, someone will cut corners.

It’s a ravenous beast, the market. Like its customers, as it turns out.

So now that you care I’ll tell you that we’ve been highlighting the plight of dairy farmers this year; explaining how supermarkets are paying such a pittance that they can’t stay in business and milk is increasingly coming in from abroad, where standards are lower. Pleasingly people noticed. Some people. If you weren’t one, perhaps, given events, you might like to now?

And when you’ve done that, take a look at the video in the link below, which details the Countryside Alliance’s hard-fought campaign on country-of-origin food labeling. Whilst you were suggesting the CA was only interested in fox hunting, it was doing this, for you, and now you know why.

SOS Dairy: http://www.fwi.co.uk/articles/29/12/2012/136833/sos-dairy-farmers-end-2012-with-heads-held-high.htm

Food labelling: http://www.countryside-alliance.org...ng/our-step-towards-victory-on-meat-labelling
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Link: http://themakingprogressblues.wordp...rdest-thing-to-digest-is-that-its-your-fault/
 
Freakbro said:
This is just the tip of the iceberg though, a few people will get a slap on the wrist then everything will go back to business as usual. I have friends who work in/run companies in the food industry and the stories I have heard over the years would make your toes curl.
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I'm not bothered, I just won't buy untraceable ****.
 
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