British Beef

"Don't be silly - nothing unusual here at all..."

My wife went to a hen night last evening

She said the stripper was all british beef with a trace of horse DNA

What concerns me is that the reputation of British Beef, which is some of the best in the world, is being tarnished by the actions of some criminal types in Rumania, Holland, Spain and France. The fact is there is nothing wrong with British Beef, it's the fact that horse and other meats are fraudulently being used in place of the beef that should be there. This problem isn't confined to Britain but is undoubtably Euro-wide and in the processed products in question, manufactured in Holland etc, a lot of them wouldn't have contained contained British Beef in the first place. We Brits should get the credit for identifying the problem, and the problem per se, is not one with British Beef.

Time for a nice juicy T-bone.

Nothing wrong with most beef no matter where its from,  France Holland Romania all have excellent animals I am sure;   and Irish - I know - is outstanding.  British beef is probably the most carefully controlled in that we do know the animals parentage, its movements from birth to slaughter & its age to the day. 

The problem happens when supermarkets spec mangled beef (burgers, lasagna, pie) with cost as the top priority & give the contract to the lowest bidder & then don't ensure adequate QA checks on products in house & at the processors. 

Forget super market manged meats,  make your own,  its simple & CHEAPER

Better still - USE YOUR LOCAL REAL BUTCHER

Absolutely Mike. I just wanted to stand up for British Beef. After all that's the heading of this thread.

You are spot-on with this post Mike. Only problem is in many UK towns REAL butchers(and greengrocers) are becoming harder and harder to find. As soon as one of the big supermarkets move in they often just kill the small local traders stone dead.

Mista h

You are right,we have fallen into the supermarket trap too, the last real butcher left Crawley, a couple of years ago, we make the trip to his Horley shop once a year for  xmas meat.

A change of household policy is called for, if we shop at Waitrose we can do the real butcher at the same time, or at least maybe once a month. Larger/second freezer might be needed.

Who caused the real butchers & green grocers to close down ??

Why do we all flock into the supermarkets like mindless sheep to buy (at best) 2nd rate meat,  thats not saying anything about ready made mangled stuff & ready meals ..... We are all to blame

Thank goodness my village has a butcher & a half decent general store/green grocer & pleased to see most people in the village & surrounding area use them. 

But the challenge is to convince those who are struggling with budgets that it really really is cheaper to DIY - even if they have to fit it into the time between kids/school/work etc ..

Mike,

Yet again you are correct. Last Friday I bought 3lb of fresh mince, a sirloin steak and 3 large pork chops, all of the best quality, from Gibson's our local butchers for £13. With the mince I made a large batch of Bolognese sauce, enough for 10 very generous portions. In total that made a total of 14 meals, less than £1 a portion meat wise. Even adding another £10 for pasta and vegetables it's still less than £2 per meal. It's not like we're scrimping, it's just an example of last weeks shopping but it shows how you can eat well and cheaply with fresh produce. By the way we only had the Bolognese once during the week, freezing the rest, and we had a few times fish as well.

Steve

My favourit beef - Aberdeen Angus

Chris N

Don't confuse British beef, the provenance of which by law must be able to be traced back to the farmer, with beef ready meals sold in the UK by supermarkets.

The Red Tractor symbol on ready meals is also a sign of known UK provenance.

Last week I got an email from the CEO of Sainsbury's, actually a general email to all subscribers in his name. The email sought to reassure customers about the beef/hors meat situation. They say that they have carried out around 250 tests in line with FSA requirements, across all ranges and no horse meat was discovered. They say that they have carried out DNA testing for over a decade alongside checks for country of origin, auditing of accredited suppliers and independent analysis. In addition they work with over 2,500 farmers to build long term sustainable relationships.....I could go on but I won't.

Anyway, I took the email as an example of a company distancing themselves from a bad situation and possible being a bit smug about it.

My Director of Procurement had the same email,  I too thought it good to show customer care thru reassurance from the top man, then I thought it reads very much like a we are better quality distancing attempt  ......  I see the smug stuff now that you've pointed it out.  

However going back quite a few years when I was hoofing around the planet running my cmpy aftermarket support team I got to see inside a lot of meat mangling factories. Including Sainsburys;  and like all of them the products are all 3rd & 4th & 5th party suppliers so they honestly do not have that much to be so smug about

I can tell you that it might have been beef Jim,  but not as we know it,  in all of them.  

Ikea... Their shelving systems might be good for storing my LP's and CD's but I never had any of their meatballs, because I didn't like the look of them. I discover in todays news that It was a good call

It always used to be said that if a peson ever went into a sausage factory then they would never eat another sausage!

In reality, if you cannot see what the food is - in other words it has not been minced, mangled, or ground-up - then one has a fat chance of actually knowing whatever is in the food!

The only way to buy good sausages was to patronise a quality local butcher, whose very livelihood depended on his customers believing in the quality of his products.

In the industrialized food processing environment, the operatives and labourers have no connection with the customers, and the quality link is lost. Most workers in the food industry are among the lowest paid, and working in less than pleasant conditions, frequently for very large companies whose head office may not even be in the country where the factory is. They don't want to lose their jobs, but neither will they have any direct connection with the consumers of their production. 

Unfortunately for the all too gullible consumer of the end product, these very large companies who process food have absolutely only one interest and that is profit. Anything that can be got away with will be, and we are seeing the results - yet again - another food scandal as a ...

I have no idea what the solution is, because so many people today are so without domestic science education that even the simplest kitchen tasks are beyond them. Boiling an egg is a challenge, but turning on a microwave is seemingly still within grasp. 

This was another triumph of Political Correctness gone mad as it was felt that Domestic Science had the tendency to divide school pupils along gender lines. 

Strangely enough I suspect that if domestic science were once again introduced as a serious subject at school, then this division would be much less marked in our modern world ...

ATB from George

I can't ague with your thinking George.

I know people, including one of my daughters, who worked in these places as students for holiday jobs. Boy did they open my eyes to some of the activities.

On the domestic science front I agree - an awful lot of children don't even know where a particular type of food comes from e.g. Beef from cattle, pork from pig...

People don't even like to see a whole fish in front of them these days. I've heard things like "The eyes keep looking at me.. blub, blub".

A very good post George......just like to throw open a few questions

We are all talking about horse meat,but what goes into some of our tinned foods ?

What about fish what goes into the likes of fish fingers/fishcakes etc etc

What pesticides are sprayed on our fruit & veg ?

What goes into some drinks on supermarket shelves ?

Lastly although less important,i dread to think what goes into pet food. A few weeks ago whilst opening a sachet of Tuna for our Moggy i took the trouble to read the label. A WELL KNOWN BRAND OF PETFOOD....FISH CONTENT 4%....whats the other 96% ?

Mista h 

Deaar mista h,

The questions you pose about what is in it will not be answered honestly, I fear.

I am guessing that tinned whole tomatoes are safer than many things, and hopefully not contaminated by pesticide residue, but how thorough is the testing?

This current horse thing shows that it may well be insufficient.

In the UK pesticide use is very tightly controlled, and much more restricted than thrity or forty years ago [when I was a young lad working on my father's tenanted farm], when some really horrific chemicals were used legally, but who knows whether these now banned chemicals are actually still in use in less regulated places than the UK?

We are offered un-seasonal foods that are grown artificially and sometimes whole continents away, so that we may buy fresh every day from the supermarket, but is this a good thing, or even remotely healthy?

I rather suspect not.

For myself, I love the seasonanilty of the vegetables, and buy accordingly. 

Swede is a cheap as chips, requires absolutely no pesticides to grow well, and after the first frosts of winter is a very tasty and filling veg that is completely healthy!

I would trust a company like Birdseye for frozen veg. Same for the home brand of the Co-op.

I would trust none of the major privately capitalised supermarket groups to play fair, or act in the best interest of their customers' health ...

To me the only strawberry worth eating comes from a farm in Wimbledon Fortnight. Spring greens in the Spring and so forth.

On the other hand, life expectancy continues to rise, but perhaps that will end when the obesity crisis tops out!

A headline from the Worcester News was that in a recent survey of school children in Worcester, ten percent are not just over-weight, but obese. Well I am guessing that the trend to living longer and longer may well be reversed as we move forward.It is certainly far more serious than those who continue to smoke a few roll-ups - like me ...

Food for thought! Sorry!

ATB from George

For myself, I love the seasonanilty of the vegetables, and buy accordingly. 

+1 George. Over 90% of what my wife and I eat is fresh veg and fresh meat and fish and no it's not expensive. This last weekend I bought a whole loin of the best fresh British pork from my butcher for £20. Out of this came 14 large pork chops and a large loin roast. We ate some (delicious), froze some and gave some to my daughter whose at university.

ATB

Steve

Surprise surprise,  they have admitted to using crap in sausages.

Suppliers are selling mechanically recovered residue under different names so it can be legally called meat & illegally included in the required "meat" content (%) of a sausage.

The mechanically separated meat (MSM) & desinewed meat (DSM) is recovered from animal bones using mechanical methods for MSM or low pressure water with DSM.

MSM is a grey colored "slurry" that is made from literally stripping (flailing) the bones below the smooth surface skin.  Unlike DSM it cannot be disguised as meat & it cannot be included in the regulatory meat content,  however it can & is used as part of the bulk content.

DSM is visually similar to a fine mince in that its red.   Now it seems suppliers use DSM using different names such as "Baader meat" and "3mm mince" & we get to eat it as one of the main meat contents of sausages.

My local butcher makes his own very excellent award winning sausages,  but even so I might just have a pork chop instead.

I think you only have to worry about that kind of mechanically recovered meat in economy type sausages. I needed a few extra Italian sausages the other week and bought some from Morrisons to go with the ones from my butcher. They didn't look as appetising as the butchers but when cooked they had a good firm consistency and coarse texture. The ones that look like smooth pink willies are the ones to avoid. I've always been wary of the frankfurter type also.