Horsemeat

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".

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

And donkeys too, it seems.

Mesolithic people were hunter gatherers and I think, the effort expended on trapping and butchering larger animals probably exceeded their food value. Small animals and seafoods were found extensively in their diets but cooking methods were primitive so most of their food was plant based.

The Neolithic was characterised by the introduction of arable farming and domestication of animals so again I think their diet was again mainly plant based.

As a child, even in a comfortably off home, we only had meat at our main meal, and not always even then I can remember quite a number of meat free main meals in my mothers repertoire, cheese potato pie, baked beans, fried onion, boiled potatoes and gravy. Breakfast was usually something on toast and tea was bread, spread and one slice of cake.

When I started cooking 4ozs was a standard portion per person for meat ,but now I do not even do that much as I cook mainly casseroles and similar dishes and tend to pack them with lots of vegetables, so without consciously intending it the portion of meat per serving has fallen.

Apparently they are saying that Romania has lots of horse and donkey meat because they have banned horsedrawn transport in towns. If this is true it does suggest6 that the quality of the horsemeat may not be great - or even horse! Even so it might be more appetising than some of the "mechanically recovered meat products" my daughter had to work with when she was doing research for the FSA!

Flick, we are co-operative animals, not single hunters like cheetahs, so hunting does not use a great deal more energy over and above our basal metabolic rate of energy use. Capturing a large animal would have provided food for a whole tribe so everyone benefits – great enrgy input, well spread, for relatively
little extra outlay of energy. Butchering would not have been too much of a problem with those bloody sharp flint tools. As for primitive cooking, well what more do you need than a fire to roast some meat? Have you never made a basic camping spit out of green sticks?

Traditional Inuit diets were almost, if not completely, animal products. Seals, walruses, whales – large animals! Plus fish of course.

Modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed into marginalised territories and so they are not really representative of earlier hunter-gatherers, who would also have had the advantage of much more game being available.

So I would continue to argue for a high animal food diet at least up to Neolithic times. A lot of it would have sea food, which had the double bonus of being high in protein and high in omega-3 fatty acids, both essential for the development of a large brain, which humans have.

I suppose the problem with meat now is that instead of hunting and eating animals [and therefore helping to keep them healthier in the way that other predators do] it takes vast amounts of grain etc to produce meat from beef etc.

Not to mention quite a lot of drugs.

But grazing land, such as is used for a lot of animal feeding, is often not suitable for grain production. Not all farmed meat is produced the intensive way. Where I live the fields are full of sheep and cattle. Fewer cattle at this time of year but still some. We also see pigs outdoors, and llamas!

And, after all, meat (including fish) is still a much more nutritious food than anything vegetable. It packs a much greater nutritional punch for its weight.

Especially if you're not fussed about fat (also good food), which I'm not, and which early humans weren't.

Latest horsemeat joke from Twitter: The reason we didn't all die of BSE – it was horsemeat all along

If we're eating horsemeat it makes you wonder what is actually in dog/cat food ....

I'm not sure I agree with you Bags that meat is much more nutritious than anything vegetable. Meat is of course an excellent source of protein, but there's far more to nutrition than protein. I think that anyone living on meat alone would be pretty unhealthy, whereas it's very easy to be healthy on a diet which contains no meat whatsoever.

Inuit managed to live on a meat only diet for thousands of years, nightowl, so it can't be that bad. Did you see that series of prgrammes that Saba Douglas-Hamilton made with the Sami of northern Finland? Same there – they lived almost entirely on reindeer meat. There's a lot of misinformation about meat around nowadays.

Not that I'd want to live on meat alone, but saying it can't be done or that it's unhealthy is simply wrong as these two examples (and there'll be others) show.

I guess they might have been constipated bags but living in that climate and having to "go" outside would make me constipated.
I'm afraid I have to agree with bags, nightowl it is really quite hard for a vegan to get the fat soluble vitamins and iron that they need. There is though enough vitamin C in meat to prevent scurvy. Many carnivores eat pure meat diets but in order to be a really happy herbivore we would require a much more complex digestive system and cellulose digesting bacteria to match. Meat is a doddle to digest compared to plants.
Mind you the Inuit probably did not live very long lives, but then neither would someone who had to grow enough vegetation to keep them going. (assuming no eggs, dairy, meat).
(and no I have not read the whole thread )

Can't agree, Gracesmum, about quality of food in France being better. Lots of TV coverage of frozen meals being taken off the shelves here. Supermarket food is often at or even past sell-by date and rotten fruit and vegetables are left on shelves. We shop carefully at markets and local shops, but the freshest food is often Lidl's. We buy Irish beef and New Zealand lamb when we see it, because the beef is mostly of pathetic quality since it is never hung for long enough and local lamb is twice the price and generally not as good.
Of course, horse meat is still easily and openly available.

Jess said: "the Inuit probably did not live very long lives".
Neither did the rest of humanity until the introduction of modern sanitation. In areas of the world where people still live in dire poverty, human life spans are still very short. It's not the diet that was/is the problem but disease control, not to mention infant and maternal mortality.

Saba D-H talked about the constipation problem she was having. Apparently the Sami assured her she'd adjust to the diet if she lived with them all the time. Constipation wasn't a problem for them.

Jess is right about vitamin C from fresh meat. One of the reasons Amundsen's Antarctic team survived when Scott's didn't is because when Amundsen's team ran out of fresh food and were at risk of developing scurvy, they ate their dogs which, by then, were no more use to the expedition anyway. Scott's lot didn't do that and scurvy is one of the things that depleted their precious energy, which in turn, killed them off.

One of the things, please note. But in such a hostile environment, a little thing like that is a killer.

I'm not an expert on the Inuit or the Sami Bags but I believe they do eat some vegetable based food when it is available. They also eat raw meat and I believe this is a much better provider than cooked meat of certain vitamins (including vitamin c). I also believe there is a school of thought that suggests their digestive systems (liver in particular) may have developed to cope with such large quantities of proteins and fats.

In any event, I wasn't arguing for a vegan diet, just saying that there's more to nutrition than meat and that many cultures across the world live a healthy life on a meat-free diet (which may or may not be vegan).