to think You Get what You Pay for, regarding horsemeat is unhelpful and superior

[youfhearted]

and actually, no , nobody paid for horsemeat when they bought a value burger or a findus ready meal.

why did they start testing in the first place?

It is unhelpful

tbh though horse is probably one of the least bad things I could imagine being in these types of food

Oh gawd yes, the most annoying thing i heard was a woman on the radio saying people who buy cheap products dont care what they eat. So its their own fault.

Yanbu.

And as someone on here pointed out, the issue isn't horse meat. Thd issue is that there are ingredients in food that should not be there. Thd possibility is that there are other ingredients that are harmful that haven't been tested for.

I'm assuming the person that said this makes everything from scratch - if not they are buying items created by the same food industry - a premium price doesn't ensure that there is nothing untoward going on.

YANBU at all

This whole thing is disgusting and I hope that people are prosecuted and heads roll!

Totally unhelpful. I'd never bought any of the so far named products, just because I've always cooked from scratch (because that's what my mum did lol) but my overwhelming feeling is one of relief, certainly not smugness.

YANBU. It's rude and smug.

It doesn't matter how much something costs, if you've paid for beef and been given horse, you have not got what you paid for, what you asked for or what was printed on the label.

There has been DNA testing of meat for really quite a long time. They can't check every batch, but getting a horse DNA on a random sample made them start testing more meat to find how wide spread the problem is.
It is not just what type of animal, but with say Aberdeen Angus beef the DNA must be the offspring of one of the registered Aberdeen Angus bulls to qualify. The Bulls have their DNA registered before they start being used to get cows pregnant.
Having been involved in the meat production industry and knowing all about traceability this is a disgrace. I hope there will be enormous fines for the companies involved. The industry has spent huge amounts of time and effort to give good traceability to restore faith in the industry after BSE and these cowboys come a long and make a mockery of it.

YANBU. You're right in that no one paid expecting in so it's wrong that it was in there.

However when I've had to eat value meat I did imagine far worse in it than horse. You do get what you pay for, and if you're eating value meat I think horse meat is the least of the worries. Since this has came out I've found a lot more information about what is in value meat apart from horse and will be trying to avoid in the future.

A) What JeezyOrangePips said.
B) However, I had been thinking for a while that our excess horses were going somewhere, either in pet food or human food.

The current recession is really affecting horses- they're expensive to keep at the best of times, and the number of people who can afford them is dwindling. But they're retaining their value at the slaughterhouse...

www.redwings.org.uk/news-horsecrisis.php

The following link is extremely upsetting.
www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/9813408/Horses-beaten-with-iron-bars-at-abattoir.html

YADNBU

i did work in a chicken factory at one point and absolutely everything went into meals, including the sweepings off the floor, which allegedly went into cat food. i do wonder now if it was only cat food it went into , but the point is, that was chicken, ? known as mechanically recovered?
and not horse. there was no horse in sight.

YANBU.it's smugness and snobbery.

also another point, you dont see a tin of dog food with horsemeat written on it either, though, or perhaps it is known as somethign else??

YANBU in this specific case. Whether cheap or expensive, we should expect food to be accurately labelled and safe to eat. But cheap processed food generally, not simply meat, is always going to be bulked out with cheap ingredients and preservatives in order to achieve a low unit cost. So, whilst an economy loaf or biscuit should never be harmful to health, it is never going to be good quality or high in nutrition either.

There are plenty of cheap, natural foods that are excellent quality and high in nutrition.... processed food should always be regarded as a convenient stand-by and not a dietary staple.

YANBU i have seen posts on facebook heard in RL well why are people moaning well they are moaning because they thought they were buying BEEF burgers and BEEF lasange maybe not the best quality but at least part of a cow,

"You dont see a tin of dog food with horsemeat written on it either"

You don't see dog or cat food that is pork-flavoured either. Processed pork products use every scrap.

Well at the same time, people are thick out if they think they're getting beef burgers at 10 pence each. We're too used to getting food at far below what would be a reasonable cost to produce for what we think we're getting, and eat far too much of it as well. The price we're prepared to pay for food is too low, quality gives.

A tonne of horse meat is around 400 quid, a tonne of beef around 3000, or something in that region.

but the value and processed meals are sold in the shops for people to buy, so instead of making your own pie for example, you buy a value pie, to feed a family.
should they not be sold, or should they be sold with a health warning, You Should really be making your own and cooking from scratch?

As with all products value/economy should be sold with a full list of ingredients and nutritional information. We can all see and taste the difference (no pun intended) when a sausage is 50% meat and when it's 80% meat and we know we're going to pay a lot more for the latter.

There was a very good article on this yesterday.

It's main thrust was that it calls into question the supermarkets aggressive pricing policies which they pass onto suppliers.

The strategy of forcing suppliers to wear the costs of "special offers", often meaning they are producing at a loss means they are forced to cut corners. Or they don't but their supplier does until it reaches the end of the chain.

If suppliers refuse, they will be delisted and could go out of business.

Just because you are poor does not mean you should eat floor sweepings just to boost supermarket profits.

should they not be sold, or should they be sold with a health warning, You Should really be making your own and cooking from scratch?

sorry but this made me

I've eaten both products, so must have eaten horse. Food is the only bill I can cut back on by buying value. I know it's full of shit but that's well documented. I eat value or stave. Yanbu. I didn't get what I paid for.

Aggressive pricing is one part but the heavily industrialised nature of so much of what passes as food is also extremely important. If you look at some of the lists of ingredients on processed foods they bear no resemblance to the raw ingredients that a cook would use to produce the same thing in a kitchen. The cheaper the processed food, it seems, the longer the list of ingredients.... preservatives, stabilisers, thickeners, flavourings, colourings, anti-caking agents etc. How can a packet of biscuits stay fresh for a whole year?

We're sixty years into a mass experiment of what happens when you feed a population a diet rich in all the above ingredients which in isolation are safe, but cumulatively may not be ... and I'd argue that horse is the least of the problems.

Actually findus is not value food. Dread to think what's in the crispy pancakes

Defra was warned by its own vet medicines committee six months ago that 2-5% of samples of horsemeat slaughtered in the UK (for export) contained vet meds that are banned from the human food chain. What have they done about that, precisely? Did the ministers and officials not realise something was going very badly wrong? Especially given all horses in this country are supposed to have a passport ensuring that any animal given bute cannot end up in the food chain?

And why are retailers and manufacturers acting all surprised about horsemeat ending up in their products - do they not monitor their supply chain? Why did Findus not recall their horsemeat 'beef' lasagne the second the tests came back, rather than waiting for a week?

Why are there so many companies involved - a French company making Findus ready meals that it turns out sources its meat from Romania. Clearly loads of opportunities for things to go wrong.

FFS, you'd think after BSE officials and agencies and every organisation involved would have learned that you can't fuck about with food supply.