What is the point?
Getting back to the Horsemeat Saga.
What is the point of traffic signals on food.....when we don't know what is in them?
The Government said it was encouraging "healthy" eating - but when the Irish Food Safety Team tested food and it wasn't what we expected.....what are we eating?
To me it is easier to spin traffic light system for food - rather than do the job properly and check what is in the food.
Daily Smile in the Sun
I have friends who swear they dream in colour...........
I say it's just a pigment of their imagination!
What is the point of traffic signals on food.....when we don't know what is in them?
The Government said it was encouraging "healthy" eating - but when the Irish Food Safety Team tested food and it wasn't what we expected.....what are we eating?
To me it is easier to spin traffic light system for food - rather than do the job properly and check what is in the food.
Daily Smile in the Sun
I have friends who swear they dream in colour...........
I say it's just a pigment of their imagination!
Comments
In the old days when fresh meat was handled only by the butcher before reaching the kitchen where it was cooked on the day, there were far less cases of food-poisoning.
My opinion, anyway; I have no doubt someone's going to chew on cud for a while before finding a sharp-tongued reply. ;)
By way of 1 piece of evidence here are the food poisoning statistics for the UK from 1998 - 2010. 93,000 incidents in 1998 down to just 53,000 incidents in 2010.
In the 1700s/1800s/1900s grocers used to adulterate their products with the most appalling things, many of them not only unsavoury but poisonous too.
The first two links were very long so I used Tinyurl to shorten them, they are completely safe to follow.
http://tinyurl.com/agnbnt3
http://tinyurl.com/aob46sw
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/health/health1.html
By the old days, I meant what I knew in my childhood, ie. fresh products purchased from specialist shops -not a luxury at all, they were the norm where I grew up in the 70s: meat from the butcher's, sourced locally; fish from the fishmonger's, also fairly local as the closest port was an hour away; fruit and veg from the green grocer's. I even remember the names of the those good people as they were very much part of the local community, living above their shops. The nearest supermarket was about half an hour across the city so big shopping was very rare.
I do think our relunctance to prepare food ourselves, from fresh products, is what makes it easy nowadays for manufacturers to pour rubbish down our throats.
Rat-race diet.
Hearing 'What the Papers Say' on Radio 4 last night - we export Exmoor, Dartmoor and New Forest Ponies to Italy for food..........
Pining Lass I have just read your links......errr!
Mathew G I have read your link too - if I had food poisoning I don't think I would bother to report.
I am not sure that I believe any statistics any more - after learning crime figures are going down - partly because warnings and so many other previous crime figures are not now counted.
I feel everything is 'dumbed' down. Your hear far more about Norovirus now than you did ten years ago...cruise ships, hotels and hospitals. Cooking meat 'rare' to me is worrying.......when you see pinkish meat with blood...
P.s.
I am having home made soup tonight.....wonder why?
how can you take a story about incorrect ingredients being discovered by food testing and infer from it that we are "not testing what the ingredients are"!
The data in the link I shared was split into "reported" and "determined" counts so you could see the data about how total numbers of cases are derived from reports.
The reason you hear about norovirus outbreaks is because of better regulation, reporting, and 24 hour media and Internet, not because there are more outbreaks.
And the red liquid which comes out of meat is not blood.
Eat low on the food chain (less meat, more plant foods,) buy organic when you can, keep away from processed foods and cook! I don't do this every day, but I do try my best! I'm no saint, we still get pot noodles for my son, and biscuits on occasions, and I have curry (pataks) sauces reserves in the cupboards. That's all, have some cooking to do! Actually more like dog walking, cleaning,......Have a good day every one, May do a soup later, it's soup weather! Brrrrrrrrrrr!
Food industry finds itself contaminated as burger crisis deepens
The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) insists that its tests carried out on cheaper "value" burgers in various supermarkets were completely random; that it had no advanced information and there was no whistleblower pointing it towards possible equine "contamination" in bovine food products.
Sidmouth Seagull - great post, and exactly my point - the discovery of contamination here was as a result of the regulatory and testing regime that already exists to protect consumers. It's great to see that it works, and hopefully this will deter unscrupulous food manufacturers from doing this sort of thing in future. With luck there will be some prosecutions arising out of this debacle!
Mathew Sorry this is so long
I was told many years ago by an Environmental Health Officer (who didn't know I was really a Seagull, so would be very interested in this!l) that the best food to kill bacteria was fish and chips because of the heat it is cooked in - I did not question the health (obese) issues and whether he was correct.
What is worrying is this article from the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/jan/18/horsemeat-scandal-regulation-food-industry
The first question for the government is why the adulteration was detected in Ireland and not in the UK? The Food Safety Authority of Ireland detected the illegal meat on products from two processing plants in the Irish Republic and one in Yorkshire. Why wasn't it picked up here?
First, in 2010, the government split responsibilities for food inspections, creating a more complicated system for food regulation. The Department of Health remained the sponsoring body for the Food Standards Agency. The FSA retained responsibility for food safety issues and meat inspections. But food labelling and composition were transferred to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Why was no national system put in place to regularly audit labelling and composition to protect consumers? Defra's silence on the lack of a national system or process to check what exactly is in our food has been deafening.
Second, the government does not like regulation. The Food Standards Agency meat hygiene service is being cut by £12m over four years. At local level, trading standards oversees local food checks and inspections. The National Audit Office states that funding for trading standards will go down from £213m to about £140m by 2014. Hundreds of trading standards jobs have been cut by councils facing huge budget pressures.
This raises questions as to whether these services can protect consumers properly. Trading standards officers now have more responsibilities, but there is less money to deliver them. They are encouraged to focus only on statutory food safety checks and focus on high risk businesses like late night fast-food shops.
Maria,
I am also concerned about what has been sprayed on fruit to prolong it's life, unless you wash it off - you are eating it too.
Totally disagree with that:
We are living longer partly due to advances in medicine, but also because we are fortunate enough to live in modern times, when no-one is working like a slave for peanuts.
Our newly found lifestyle bonanza is in great part responsible for a lot of cancer-related deaths, coronaries and heart disease; live by the sword, die by the sword.
Within that lifestyle, lack of exercise and excess food are the main culprits.
We live at the other end of the spectrum from the famine-stricken African population; they die from lack of food while we die from ingesting too much -and unhealthy products as well.
The truth is, if manufacturers didn't feed our greed and laziness by offering salt & grease -packed, filled with chemicals, ready-made meals, we would not be eating so much because we wouldn't have time, having to spend time cleaning, preparing, cooking fresh produce.
Our awareness of food as fuel has been completely corrupted by those who stand to make money put of our being conditioned to consume what they put on our shop sheves.
We consumers have been brainwashed into thinking we need all the rubbish that's on offer in the shops!
Live natural and simple, don't just take it because it's there, use your grey matter = live better.
I'd rather have a better life than a longer one, but then the latter probably follows from the former. :)
This gets me back to my first post......
Unless we know what is actually in the food - how can you start this traffic light system for healthy eating?
Green - good etc.
The Food Standards Agency in Britain has launched its own investigation.
More worryingly still, the Government's claims that there is no threat to human health is already being questioned by at least one respected source.
The Society of Chief Officers of Environmental Health in Scotland said burgers containing horsemeat could have been made from diseased or injured animals.
Society chairman John Sleith said: "We note that statements are being made that it is not a health issue, but our concern is there is no information on how the horsemeat came to be in the burgers and so there is no way of telling whether the meat is safe to eat. It could be from diseased or injured animals, for example."
It's hard to argue with his logic. If you didn't know there was horsemeat in the burgers in the first place, how can you vouch for its provenance?
Anne V you seem to be making the opposite point - that everyone is greedy and lazy so it's somehow the food manufacturers' faults that they provide easy food options (like ready meals) for us to eat. I think everyone has to take some personal responsibility, and not blame a food manufacturer for manufacturing food for which there is huge demand from the public!
Sidmouth Seagull the most recent updates I've read on the "horsegate" (perhaps we should call it "stable door"!!) suggest that in fact there was no "horse meat" involved at all, but a protein powder added to the beef burgers to make them more "meaty". This powder would be made from animal carcasses and because of the manufacturing process there would be a concentration of DNA from the source animals leading to a completely misleading 29% figure, when in fact it's only a tiny part of the total. Doesn't make it any less concerning - just more easy to understand how this could fall through the cracks as it has.
Still like this.
Where is Exeter Races I keep saying to myself?
The truth is - if you want cheap food - then that is exactly what you will get. Meat content in burgers etc includes fat, ligaments and ground-down goodness knows what and is part of the "meat" content on the label.
Until people start treating meat for what it is - ie a luxury and therefore pay for the occasional meat-treat dinner - then this will continue. Horses and donkeys are regularly eaten in processed meats - and no one has complained because ignorance was bliss.
But why the fuss about horsemeat? Why not a fuss and outrage about the cows? Pigs? Sheep? Chickens? Cheap production of these animals include large doses of growth hormones, and because the cheap-meat production sysytems keeps these animals confined and closely packed together as they grow - they are also given masses of antibiotics...which has a knock-on effect on the cellular development of anyone who eats these animals. Buy a £2 chicken or a £8 chicken? Some can buy the dearer chicken weekly - but if people gave up the £2 chicken and bought chicken once a month for £8.....but they won't of course.
And if everyone opened their eyes to what conditions are like for millions of animals as they reach the slaughterhouses - very few people would eat animals anyway!
Philip Wollen says it all - please watch the link. It will make you think...
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