Horsemeat

BTW, Mr Bags reckons Stone Age people ate far more meat than modern people do. They wouldn't have had all the farmed carbs we have.

I did understand what you meant, absent. Global meat consumption is rising. Somepoeple think this is a bad thing but to me it indicates that people who had very little meat in their diets before, now have a bit more, which I regard as a good thing. Greed in the 'west' is another matter.

I remember my mum saying in the mid to late sixties that she reckoned to spend one shilling per person on the Sunday roast (brisket or lamb shoulder usually). Sometimes there would be enough left for her lunch the next day. She was working on the 4oz per person rule, and if she made shepherd's pie or bolognese she'd spread it even 'thinner'. Feeding five hungry kids must have been quite hard at times but she always provided us with good, simple meals.

I agree Bags we eat a lot less meat now than when we were children. We were both brought up on meat and 2 veg and they were large protions of meat. Now that there is a much greater variety of food available we have meat free meals which we never had when we were children. In fact we had 2 cooked meals a day, lunch and dinner, now we only have one main meal a day.

Bags I didn't mean the immediate past, although even in my lifetime meat consumption has massively increased in the West (not mine personally). When I first started writing recipes back in the the 1970s, the standard single portion
allowed was 4 oz (120 g) meat off the bone and 6 oz (175 g) on the bone. Not any more.

glam, I love the sea horse free fish! People have such brilliant senses of humour

So we keep being told, absent (about people eating less meat in the past). I believe you in general terms, but I don't eat more meat than I used to eat. I probably eat less.

I think taste is the best test of good food. It's very easy to distinguish good meat from less good meat just by taste. Good meat quite simply has more flavour. It often looks better too, but I guess you can't tell that with processed, packaged food.

I think I saw something today saying that the Food Standards Agency had reassured ministers today that all the food under scrutiny was perfectly fit for human consumption. That doesn't mean it tastes nice, necessarily.

I'm as happy to eat horse meat as I am to eat ostrich or deer or boar or lamb or cow or salmon or.... well, you get the idea.

Horses slaughtered in Romania, probably last August. (They are no longer allowed to export live horses for slaughter to reduce the risk of the anaemia known as equine AIDS). The meat goes to France where it is butchered. (How professional butchers fail to recognise horse carcasses and differentiate them from those of cattle is not explained.) The meat, labelled as beef (who did that?) goes to Luxembourg where it is processed into burgers, lasagne, shepherds pie, etc. The processed ready meals are shipped to other European countries, including the UK, where they are often sold at so-called bargain prices.

It is the perfect scenario for organised crime.

In the past Bags people ate a lot less meat a lot less frequently than they do now. It was usually from a local source or even their own prize pig, fattened up and slaughtered. It didn't travel hundreds of miles before it got to the table.

Tegen
"Supposed" meaning only that they should,and not that they neccessarily do....
Its only too easy to cheat,and not a problem to get drugs on the internet either-which of course,are not recorded by the vet-ie,he has no record of you ever having those drugs....

and its true expensive need not mean better.While a student at university ,one of my sons worked in a food processing plant.where they made,amongst other things,sausages.
(^He said" you would never eat sausages again,if you saw what went into them! ugh^)

"And" he siad they used exactly the same batch of sausage meat for joe bloggs cheapie sausages,as for a well known "better" supermarkets own brand!
He thought it quite a laugh that someone "swankie" thought they would be getting a better product,just because they paid a lot more!

Bags I have caught up now on the posts and must congratulate you on the best laugh I have had in a while re horses taking our jobs,a bit like the restaurant stating that all their fish was "sea horse free".

Bags I don't think people needed to be fussy years ago, as there wasn't the manufactured food, it was mainly fresh, and farming wasn't so reliant on manufactured fertilisers.

I wonder if people in general were ever really fussy about where their food came from or what it was, exactly, when they struggled to get enough to eat. It's only recently, during the last few generations (very few), that we in the 'rich' world have been able to be particular. Particularity about food is a modern phenomenon for all but the very rich. Most people never were bothered so long as they got enough to eat, and I suspect that that is still the case.

What's changed is the growth of interest in farming practices and the ethics involved in caring for farm animals, but even that is probably a minority concern. I know people, for instance, who simply don't want to know because they feel it would restrict their choices.

The veggie options are good.

What I mean is, how many people actually ask or try to find out where the food is sourced? There's an assumption that because there are so many controls with colourings and addatives everything else is regulated in the same way. In some pubs and restaurants the only meat option is chicken. And because it's cheap chicken from goodness knows where, raised in goodness knows what conditions. The nanny state seems to have turned most of the population into mindless morons.

Nobody has to eat in Pizza Express. We all have at least some customer power and choice about where and what we buy.

I wouldn't have though eating Pizza Express food was a 'cheap' choice for the customer, even if the food is not great quality.

NB I have no idea what the quality of food is at Pizza Express!

gracesmum sums it all up perfectly. Anyone tried asking where the chicken comes from in chain restaurants? Pizza Express - Brazil. Not much quality check there either I suspect.

Why not, there's a welsh one . It's called the taffia!

Mafia has become shorthand for organised crime, hasn't it? Russian, Polish, whatever. They say the horse meat is Romanian. So does that mean there's a Romanian mafia as well?

bags great best laugh in ages

Talk is now of Mafia involvement and Polish Mafia involvement. Is there such a thing as a Polish branch of the Mafia or do they just mean organised crime?

Bags

Yippee! Glad someone found it, baubles. It had me in stitches too.

Bellows with laughter at the feckin' horses

Terry Leahy was on DI Discs this week and pointed out that when he was a youngster people spent 50% of their income on food and now it is 10%

feckin' horses, coming over here, taking our jobs [loud laughter]

I still don't know the in's and out's of the trade in horses to Europe; I know over the years I've signed petitions to stop the live transportation of horses to the continent but not sure what the ruling is these days [I should look into it again]. Perhaps what has happened with these beefburgers is a valid reason for other countries to want to see what they're getting? Also perhaps it doesn't help that those of us that do eat meat try not to think too much about what we're eating and what happened before it reached our dinner plate. I'm not a vegetarion but eat very little in the way of red meat, although I eat a lot of chicken. I agree with what gracesmum has said about the over use of antibiotics in animals as well. All very worrying.

True. There are the supermarkets' own reassurances. I believe the Co-op ones about their freedom food.