Horsemeat scandal: has it changed your shopping habits?

Lyn,I agree with you that you don’t have to pay for expensive cuts of meat to make a delicious meal. A casserole is one of my favourites, as is a lamb hot pot; cheap cuts cooked slowly.
Where I don’t agree is that retailers have little regard for quality – some don’t seem to, or at least they have lost control of quality – hence horse meat (and what else?) – arrive in products without their knowledge. There are other retailers who do pay attention to quality – worth shopping there where there is still trust.

Malcolm, Lyn, I think you’re being a little cynical about the retailers – and so are most people. Terms like ‘exploited’ and ‘little regard’ mean that you think that all of the big retailers, who continually stress the pains they take to source even the cheapest foods as safely and reliably as possible, show that you think they’re blatantly lying.

This would be a stupid move on their part, as the penalties for being caught are so huge in money, in sales and in reputation. So they wouldn’t do it – it’s not worth the potential loss. Far from calling them out on this, the government officials have stressed that they see no health risk and began immediately looking far down the supply chain to find the scam. I don’t say that the supermarkets and big names couldn’t have been more vigilant, but that’s after an unusually careful Irish inspectorate, suspecting the Ireland-to-England horse carcass certificate scam that was eventually uncovered, went as far as to do the NEW DNA checks on carcasses. This prompted others to follow suit and the fact that horsemeat was in Eastern European mixed meat products became public here. This is completely legal; what wasn’t was the lack of ‘horsemeat’ on the labels provided by the UK factories that used this source, when the supermarkets commissioning them had already specifically asked that it wouldn’t be.

So where did that place a supermarket’s responsibilities five years ago, when the expensive DNA testing that was the only way to uncover this was only used in court cases and was available only from a few specialized labs? I don’t see them as culpable – until circumstance had clearly changed. And then they mostly did react very quickly.

It’s different now, of course. DNA testing is now much cheaper (though still costly) and many more labs have begun to tool up to provide the service, so random tests can become routine. But it’s hardly the supermarkets’ fault that they did what everyone thought then was enough checking. Legally, the retailer, not anyone in the supply chain, is responsible for any fault of anyone else – even if they couldn’t know that cheating was going on. But in truth, not in law, it’s the same situation as if you’re passed a very well forged banknote at a supermarket till, from a clip that’s come straight from their bank. If neither the bank teller and scanners, nor the supermarket cashier could spot the forgery, whose fault is it?

David, I have made the point before that by not being aware that the product some (major) retailers were buying contained horsemeat was down to them not being in control of the quality of the food they acquired from their suppliers. It was fraud that was perpetrated upon them in some cases, so their suppliers were in an untrustworthy supply chain. To me that is down to inadequate quality control. If they can unknowingly be sold products containing horsemeat, what might other products contain (unknown to them) that they buy from similar dishonest sources?
I have trust in certain other major retailers that I hope proves justified. That is not cynicism, it is a logical response to the facts in my view.
I do not understand your statement that product containing horsemeat is “completely legal” – it is not in products that are not meant to contain it, particularly when it’s quality is unknown. I would not object to buying horsemeat if properly labelled from a reputable source, assuming it to be have been properly slaughtered and inspected. Can we be sure the horsemeat sold fraudulently has been properly sourced? I don’t see why when the process in part may be criminal rather than genuine error; criminal suppliers would not necessarily have any regard for the supply of a wholesome product.

Malcolm, I do agree with you. It’s legal everywhere for human food to contain horsemeat – it just has to be declared, and musn’t be in a product that states that it’s solely something else, eg, beef. But burgers and sausages can say ‘beef’ or ‘pork’ on the label, as long as it’s made sufficiently clear that other meats are present. Look at most Hot Dog bottles and cans, and you’ll see how much chicken and turkey is in what traditionally was a pure pork food.

As far as criminal activity is concerned, I’m sure that you’re right. But sheer economics comes into this, too. This horsemeat scandal has come about because of a sudden glut of very cheap horse carcasses in Eastern Europe and some creative people spotted an illegal way to make a quick profit. Ordinarily, with horse being a premium meat, it wouldn’t be available so widely. As far as I can gather, the surplus horses in Romania would have been processed by local rules quite legally and to a good hygiene standard. It’s when the company two steps along the chain hides its provenance to sell the low-price mixed meat as a more expensive mixed meat for UK use that you get the crime. And until recently, it would have been undetectable except at huge cost.

There are regulations about pet food safety, and manufacturers must follow them. But remember, this conversation isn’t really about food safety – that never was an issue – but about labels that are fully disclosing of the contents and not misleading. And the rules about pet food are much more lax than those for human food.

Think, though. Just as for people, there’s no rule that says that what you buy to eat has to be good nutrition, just that it not be dangerous. As long as any claims on the packaging can be substantiated, no law is broken if you feed your animal junk. It was proven over 100 years ago (by Pavlov, to get a Nobel Prize) that dog, for example, digest mixed food poorly and are much better off eating meat quite separately from biscuit and other carbohydrates. More recently, it’s become known that chocolate is harmful to dogs. Yet makers still peddle ‘complete meal ‘ mixes for dogs; and owners still think chocolate is a dog treat!

The sad fact is that dogs, especially large ones, have a short life and the effects of bad diet are too little known for you to sue a maker whose dogfood is poor nutrition, yet claims otherwise. That’s why so many owners won’t feed their pets on manufactured foods.