What’s really in your lamb takeaway?

I’m a sceptic when it comes to take-aways – full of mistrust. When I see 300 dishes on our local Chinese menu I have to wonder at the way they are supplied and produced. We generally buy food from places we can trust; our take-aways are generally meals from M&S or Waitrose or fish and chips. I’m sure we miss out on some of life’s great experiences.
As far as enforcement is concerned, we seem very lenient with standards of hygiene in restaurants and take-aways – warnings when standards may be abysmal from the spate of TV documentaries, if they are representative. I would close a premises until proper hygiene could be reliably established, and do the same if they served food not of the appropriate quality. That might be an incentive to trade properly. But I doubt if there are anything like the resources available to test the authenticity of food on the scale required.

Food substitution must be treated as fraud and the offenders punished. The only complication is that affected ingredients could have been purchased in good faith. If the Which? investigation is representative, this indicates that the problem is out of control and effective action is urgently needed.

I am far more concerned about food hygiene. Food poisoning is usually just unpleasant but can be much more serious. Premises should be subject to annual inspections and required to display their food hygiene rating, as is compulsory in Wales.

I feel sorry for the owners and staff of takeaways where customers are treated honestly and food is handled safely.

All this does is re-enforce my believe that I can’t trust takeaways and therefore I don’t use them.

I’d certainly be interested to see the receipts for the raw ingredients to see whether this is deliberate on the part of the takeaway, or the supplier(s).

And like wavechange says, its should be law to display your food rating in the whole of the UK. I can’t see a good reason for why it isn’t already, And maybe the rating should include an element of the correct ingredients being used. Maybe by adjusting the rating by the %age of questionable ingredients used. So if 50% of products bought don’t have the correct ingredients then the rating is reduced by 50%.

I’ve heard that imported ground almond can be adulterated with ground peanut (because it’s cheaper) – not good for people with peanut allergies.

Environmental health officers undertake the food safety inspections and do not concern themselves with the contents of the menu so long as they are stored and prepared hygienically. Trading standards officers enforce the selling of goods and the prevention of fraud through misdescription; they probably do not inspect restaurants and takeaways routinely and only visit if a complaint is raised. I suspect the police have an anti-fraud role too if they choose to exercise it but they probably prefer to leave it to TSO’s. Both local authority inspection regimes have a track record of acting like lambs and need to beef up their roles in protecting the public. Like Wavechange, I think the hygiene issue is the higher priority but a few prosecutions for mis-labelling wouldn’t go amiss. The temptation to sell the wong meat in disguise by being covered in curry sauce or mashed-up in a kebab is obviously quite powerful in today’s competitive market, especially when the patrons of such outlets are generally disinclined to complain or are incapable of noticing if something is wrong.

The problem here is one of funding the inspection authorities – both to monitor hygiene and to test, it appears now, for fake food. These are two separate issues, the first assuredly being dangerous to health, the second maybe not, but defrauding you. Whilst I agree with the idea of substantial penalties being imposed and used to fund inspection, there is always the danger that courts may not impose adequate penalties. So an alternative is a mandatory local authority penalty for infringement – but it is subject to the same problems as parking wardens – it may be misused to raise revenue.
For hygiene TSOs need assured income if they are to have the resources to do their job, so one way would be to license takeaways (and restaurants) with a significant annual charge. This would cover routine inspections. Then penalties for infringement and closure in appropriate cases until remedies are in place. The prospect of closure may deter owners from trying to get away with poor standards of hygiene.
Fraudulent food is a much more difficult problem – you cannot possibly monitor all outlets for all foods. It will depend upon intelligence. Only spot-checks and then following through to suppliers and associated outlets might be practical. A job for FSA and police? Could a license fee be enough to fund this as well?

I have been following the story of Quorn since before it was launched. It is a filamentous fungus (mould). Perfectly harmless but not particularly appealing to list on the ingredients list. The first product containing Quorn mycoprotein was a savoury pie sold by Sainsburys. The description of Quorn was that it was a tiny plant distantly related to the mushroom. That’s honesty in advertising for you.

The description has changed several times since the launch of Quorn in 1985. I have just noticed that a current product containing Quorn explains that Quorn mycoprotein is a member of the fungi/mould family. Truth at last.

Unfortunately the product is NEW Quorn Pork Pies. In fairness, the packet is clearly marked as meat free, but why even think of marketing anything devoid of meat as Pork Pies.

I assume that the makers of Quorn were persecuted until they admitted that it is largely mould but let round two of the persecution start.