Horsemeat

The queen can.a lot of them are hers as in swan upping!

I've just remembered those vile powdered protein drinks DH likes. 25% protein from milk (whey). So 29% from horsemeat doesn't sound far fetched.

My grandfather ate blackbirds during lean times, as I daresay did other poor people in the past.

Anything for some nourishment. Ooor people can't start getting into emotional tangles about food.

Rook pie?

Four and twenty black birds?

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

I have no sympathy with Tesco over the horsemeat fiasco. As a company it is notorious for grinding its suppliers into the ground to get the cheapest price. This is a classic case of getting what you pay for. I would suspect that horsemeat is a lot cheaper than beef so to meet the abysmal price Tesco was prepared pay the supplier replaced a significant part of the beef with horse.

According to the papers the owner of the Irish company who made them has a somewhat chequered history. He was a crony of Charles Haughey, the Irish Prime MInister notorious for his corruption and kickbacks and had the company bailed out once by the government and then bought it back cheaply.

Look on the bright side the consumer got a much healthier burger than if the meat was all beef. Horse is a much leaner meat with less fat.

Except I read that the 27% horse DNA could well have been some distinctly un-nourishing boiled hide.. which apparently, in labeling circles, can be termed seasoning

The crucial fact here is whether the horse meat came from horses bread for consumption, as happens in France.
God knows where this meat came from.
Once the cargo from where ever has been through Rotterdam it will state European.
That is SO wrong!
But not illegal, thanks to the EU.

Can't trust the Dutch anyway. A great trading nation. They would sell me if I still had market value.

But if the 27% (I read 29% elsewhere) of stuff containing horse DNA was protein powder, why does it matter whether the protein came from hide or muscle? It's still protein and still, presumably, edible.

I don't really understand what all the fuss is about. As far as I'm concerned the only problem is that the burgers' lists of ingredients weren't properly elucidatory on the packaging. Plenty of people eat horse protein (as meat or otherwise). Brits just tend to be a bit hung up about it. There's no logical reason why we should be.

Food doesn't have to be bred for consumption to be edible. Wild mushrooms aren't bred for consumption, for instance, nor any other "wild food" whether plant, fungus, or animal.

Bags, " wild food " would be fine .
That would be food uncontaminated by growth hormones, anti biotics etc. etc.
This so called horse meat could be made up of the dead, ( obviously ) the diseased and the disabled. Just like tinned pet food.
By bred for consumption I mean and hope there are measures in place regarding which medication is allowed and which is not.
One can but live in hope.

I see, johanna. I hadn't thought of diseased meat being used for human consumption. That would, I suppose, be against the law. Disabled? Why not, so long as the meat is healthy?

Things like antibiotics and so forth would be down to the kind of farming, so the same as for other farm-produced meat, I think.

I do think it would be great if we could 'trace' the source of the foods we eat. And of course, all food with several ingredients should be properly labelled.

In a cafe in Cairns, Australia my husband ordered fried chicken. A huge slice of chicken breast arrived and we wondered what variety of chicken grew that large. Apparently it came from Vietnam and was full of steroids - that being why Australian men are growing bigger - and developing breasts!

Surely the problem is not so much that horse meat may have been been in Tesco burgers for some time but that the contents were not listed or known. What else is there in them? Customers believe what it says on the label and that we have strict regulations to control the contents.

Perhaps the lesson is that if you buy cheap 'value' burgers you should expect to get cardboard flavoured with horse hide.

Is Cairns where Red Dog lived?

Who?

Sorry; it was Dampier. I don't know why I got the name Cairns in my head .

Actually if you saw the slurry from which cheap hamburgers are made, the presence of horse DNA would be the least of your worries.

I think that's the real worry, absent. If we don't know what's in them it could be anything. And they said the non-beef DNA was from imported 'filler'. Sounds disgusting.

glad I am a vegetarian - it would be a good thing if this fiasco made people more aware of what goes into their processed food even if they read the label it would probably take a chemist to understand all the contents.
I think lots would be surprised about the 'halal' connection with the large meat producers. I assume this does not apply to locally sourced farm bred meat? from local rural abattoirs.

The filler would appear from reports to be animal-derived protein. I don't find that disgusting or off-putting.

Lots of food 'slurry' looks fairly disgusting. Doesn't mean it is. That's just an emotional argument which has not scientific value.

I agree with everyone that proper labelling is the issue here.

And that if you buy exceptionally cheap burgers, you can't expect an exceptionally good actual meat content.

I don't find dal particularly appetising to look at, but it's perfectly edible.

Likewise some sludgy looking soups.

The filler is used to up the percentage protein with something cheaper than the main ingredient, in this case, beef. It also absorbs water so bulks out the product making it rather less of bargain than might first appear.