to find myself shouting IT'S NOT ABOUT THE HORSE MEAT

[ICBINEG]

It's about companies not having the faintest idea what is in the food they sell!

Drugs, contaminants, carcinogens, allergens etc.

If you don't even know it is horse not beef then how can I trust it doesn't contain milk and hence will not kill my DNephew if I happen to feed it to him?

The same goes for toys. If you don't know who actually made the parts and from what then how do you know it isn't smothered in lead/anything else that is extremely harmful to children?

I predict a future filled with product and toy recalls followed by lawsuits until retailers wake up to the fact that we WILL blame them when a burger/toy they sold us harms the health of our children.

princess the problem is the tendering out of supply through massive chains of companies. Even if you are careful what and where you eat there will be a bottle of sauce somewhere in the kitchen that has one of these complex supply chains where at the end of the day it could have ANYTHING in it by the time the restaurant bought it from the wholesaler.

Even 3 star restaurants won't be making their own vinegar, or olive oil, soy sauce etc.

I'm not that bothered. horse ? cow? Pig? for me, no biggie.

I wish they'd put some of that horse dna in the fish fingers to hold them together better. when i take them off the grill they fall apart, they're just neighing out for a bit of horse dna.

yes, yanbu.

I go every time it is mentioned on the news that 'the horse meat is safe, and no harm will come from eating it.

Not really the point, is it?

I CBA to get hung up over which furry/fluffy/cute animal I am consuming (although it is always nice to know), and have eaten many a 'weirder' alternative than horsemeat. But exactly how did we get to the state where companies are selling products without actually knowing what they contain, despite supposedly stringent rules on listing ingredients etc.

seriously worrying if you ask me.

and yy to point re: allergens too.

I've been having this argument with people who are disgusted with the horse meat. It's NOT about the horse meat. It's that there is ingredients in the food that shouldn't ever be there, that aren't on the ingredients list.

I don't understand why people weren't as disgusted by pork being in beef burgers as they were about the horse meat. It's just arse backwards.

Findus lasagne being 100% horse dna though, tbh that's the first headline i've read that REALLY did shock me!

Its okay everyone Ivy agrees it isn't about the horse meat!

I totally agree - I was standing in sainsburys this morning trying to decide what to buy and actually found myself wondering if I was looking at what I thought I was. My bit of ham could be anything for all I know! my tiger bread god knows whats lurking in that dough. I have no idea what the alternative is other than growing all of my own food though!

Yes YANBU. As a veggie it did make me smirk at first but it's the whole food labelling and trust in what we're buying thing that's the issue.

thats ok then

I still don't bleeding agree with you though

I do take the point that if people are prepared to buy ready meals then there is a market environment where something like this is bound to happen....but I wouldn't go as far as to say if you buy a ready meal then you deserve what happens to you....

You could say the same about the toys. If you buy cheap toys then it's your own fault if you kid gets lead poisoning. In reality it is hard to find toys that don't say 'parts made in china' which is where the problems tend to start....

Yanbu. Ds has school dinners and burgers and cottage pie are on the menu once a week. The school says they have confidence in their suppliers but I'm sure tescos and asda thought the same up to a month ago.
And if we can't trust beef why should we trust any other food product?

yanbu, you are right, that is not the issue

I would buy burgers that contain horse meat, am not squeemish about that at all.

but we have to be able to trust the food labelling being for allery or other diatary reasons. we have to or would have to go back to cooking fom scratch and keeping chickens and a pig in the back yard for consumption.
I hope the companies involved get big fines at least. it will most probably not only affect the uk but many other countries as well.

I agree it is more about the ethics of cheap meat.

I would've thought people would be more up in arms about rogue pork being in burgers etc because there are lots of religious reasons for not eating pork. I dont know of any that specifically ban horse.

The reason people cant get their head around eating horse is because we are ridiculously sentimental about animals in this country - people see horses as fluffy wuffy pets and so don't want to think they've eaten Red Rum/Black Beauty/Ed the Talking Horse/whatever. That sentimentality doesn't translate to eating fluffy wuffy lambs because they don't SEE livestock farming, they don't know what it entails, they don't make the connection with that and their roast. Or fluffy yellow chicks with their eggs. Or cute calves with milk in their tea.

We like our meat pre-packaged, pre-trimmed, with labels on them that say things like 'Good for Stir Fry'. When I was a kid (and I'm only 30-something) the butcher used to have diagrams of the animals up with different joints drawn on. I even had a children's farming book with something similar. Now we seem to want the food we eat to seem as unrelated to the idea of a dead animal as possible, yet everyone seems astonished when the industry they've turned a blind eye to for years isn't all that it seems.

I agree entirely.

I'm not all that bothered that it was horse - I am bothered that I didn't know that it was.

We have the absolute right to know what we're eating - I think that's what the "Pfff....it's horse, so what?" crew are not really getting.

Indeed...this is definitely the tip of the iceberg.

retailers either need to safety and contents check all of their own products or stop having these supply chains that mean a contamination at the 7th or 8th remove can catch them out.

Surely there only needs to be the person producing the actual food, the person constructing it into a product and the retailer?

With toys, just make the toy and then give it to the retailer! Don't farm out the painting to someone who farms it out to someone who farms it out to someone who puts lead in it! Pleeeeeease!

Agree!

If its horse meat is should be clearly stated on the ingredients.

However cheap food is it should be properly labelled, or do poorer people on a very tight budget not deserve to know what they are eating.

Some of these comments are bizarre.

I have just made this point on the other thread.
People keep saying "i don't know why everyone's getting het up about eating horsemeat, its just meat"
And yet I don't see a single person actually getting het up about eating horsemeat. I think some people read what they expect to read.

Tiger bread probably has got tigers in it and when this is discovered they will claim "well, it was clearly labelled."

Sainsbury's re-named theirs Giraffe Bread, apparently because a little girl wrote in saying the pattern on it looked more like a giraffe than a tiger. I suspect a smokescreen.

My phone corrected it to "housemate". Id like to think everyone would get het up about cannibalism!

As a vegetarian, I have to admit to an occasional smirk at this, but I agree that it is worrying for what it implies about food labelling and lack of control of the production process and supply chain. And unfortunately that could just as easily affect vegetarian foods - there was the case a couple of decades ago about the Linda McCartney pies with actual meat in them. That is one reason why I eat very few 'imitation meat' products, because really, how do you know?

We'd all be better off with much less processed stuff anyway. My mantra (though I can't always stick to it) comes from Michael Pollan: "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". The main thing is that by 'food' he means minimally processed foods, stuff your great-granny would recognise; nothing with huge long lists of ingredients, half of which you don't understand or can't pronounce, and nothing that makes diet or health claims. Though I know it's easier said than done these days...

Aparently there is an historical religious reason for not eating horse. It was outlawed by Christians in the 8th Century and it was only when Napolean realised his troops would starve because he was an idiot to invade Russia in the winter if he didn't encourage it that it became acceptable again. [And this MUST be true, I read it in the Rupert Murdoch press]

Its definitely not about the horsemeat [though it makes me feel physically sick to think about it] - its about knowing what's in the food we eat and understanding about the true costs of food. Factory farming, milk shipped in from Poland to make "genuine" west country cheddar (that is sold in Waitrose as a "made in the UK") etc etc. The public need to wake up and realise that cheap = crap. Period. I think I read somewhere that our parents generation spent one third of their income on food. A third!! We spend less than 10%.

Really glad I stopped buying ready meals and cheap meat about 15 years ago. I'd rather not eat meat ever again than eat a tesco value burger.