A new Food Crime Unit to stop a horsemeat repeat

Easier said than done, Billy. Many people have no effective choice of meat supplier. We live near a town of 25,000 people and there are probably another 10,000 living in the surrounding vilages. There is only one butcher’s shop and, as I mentioned earlier, their meat comes off a lorry in cardboard boxes. I expect they know where it comes from all right but it certainly isn’t from Arthur Fallowfield’s farm down the lane.

Billy – All meat has to be safe to eat, wherever we buy it from. That is the law.

John-we live in Cumbria. In our town we have two butchers. Check out Quality Butchers or Q butchers. With good transport links and a freezer, you will be able to access one. We have just travelled 100 miles to take a lamb for my son’s freezer. It was cut to our specification, bagged and labelled. We picked it up from the local butchers in a cardboard box and the lamb originated from our local farmer. It isn’t easy to find butchers or even good butchers but whose fault is that. Stop buying from the local butcher and they close down. Then the local abattoir closes down-then farmers struggles and goes under. Then a speculator buys up the land and builds houses on it.
The problem today is that most people are only interested in their profit.

wavechange, “All meat has to be safe to eat, wherever we buy it from. That is the law. “. As we all know people will either ignore the law, sell non-compliant mesat unknowingly, or as criminals will be involved deliberately put unsafe cheap mesat into the market to make money (e.g. condemned chicken).
It is no good relying on rules and regulations. We need honest public-spirited people who see these problems within their workplace being able to report such problems in confidence to someone who will take swift action. Should be Trading Standards. Fund them properly.

For “mesat” read “meat”! Sorry – I should read my post more carefully before pressing submit.

Billy – Meat has to go through procedures and checks before it is passed as fit for human consumption. Can you be sure that horse meat passed off as beef has gone through these procedures? It seems unlikely.

I would be happy to try horse meat provided it was sold as horse meat and passed as fit to eat.

I think you have got side tracked here. My comments refered from the beginning with the fact that the people buying from supermarkets are the cause of the decline of traditional butchers. I have never mentioned anything about safety of the meats. Even though I was aware that a lot of beef was sold off at one time that came from the ECC beef storage mountains. It was never mentioned, as far as I was aware, that this ” fresh meet” had been in cold storage for many years.

Billy – This Conversation is about the new Food Crime Unit. The safety of our food is paramount and the consumer is not in a position to know whether the food they buy is safe. One of the intentions of creating the FCU is to encourage those working in the industry to report breaches of regulations that could compromise public safety. It should also help to ensure that we buy what we pay for, not a cheaper substitute or ‘fresh’ meat that has been stored for months. As Malcolm has said, Trading Standards needs more funding to deal with criminals.

I don’t know whether meat from small butchers or giant supermarkets or is safer, but we must do our best to ensure that all food is safe, wherever we choose to buy it from.