I’ve been following this story for a few weeks. Some meat providers added horse meat to their beef hamburger. It’s showed up in several major hamburger chains like Burger King. Now its been found in frozen lasagne.
Apparently its undetectable by taste. Honestly it wouldn’t bother me at all. Meat is meat. Just make sure its a healthy and humanely treated animal. What I dislike is waste. Why throw away good meat just because it came from a horse? My uncle raised calves he bought from dairy farmers. Bottle fed and then grass & grain fed. Sold some at auctions and others went into our freezer. I grind my venison every year and have beef fat added. Makes a very tasty meatloaf.
I know other people are more squeamish. Thats fine too. Lots of people in Europe are kicking up a fuss about their not some pure burgers. Heck it took DNA testing to even discover beef burgers had this extra ingredient. It doesn’t effect taste at all.
There’s the fact you’re paying beef prices for horse(I’m assuming horse is cheaper, otherwise why bother?).
Also, if the meat packer is willing to adulterate the beef with horse, what else might they throw in the grinder to make more profit?
Yup, what Runner Pat said- who wants to buy food which is not what it claims to be? It appears that at least some of the suppliers weren’t even aware of what was going into their burgers, and that is disturbing.
I don’t eat meat anyway, but even out of those who do, the vast majority of people in the UK at least will not willingly eat horse, and I’ve never seen it openly sold - it’s easier to get hold of alligator or ostrich than horse meat.
Much of the horsemeat in the European pipeline is American. Many horses in America are give meds that are not safe for human consumption. The “owners” are suppose to provide proof that the horses slaughtered in Mexico and Canada haven’t been given these drugs, but they lie. So not only is horsemeat snuck into ground beef, it’s likely adulterated horsemeat.
People have a right to know what they’ve paid for and are consuming.
StG
Wow. Given the massive number of animals depopulated under the mad cow disease scare… I can’t imagine anyone thinking it is the least bit acceptable to mislabel products in the UK.
That lasagna was labeled as beef. Not ‘meat’ or ‘meat product’, but beef. Except that it was 100% horse… for now… how long until it contains the occasional clumsy plant worker or a couple pounds of road kill…
I totally agree that the problem needs to be fixed. If you’re selling beef than it should be 100% beef.
I was saying in the OP that eating a few months worth or even years of beef plus horse meat wouldn’t freak me out. What I ate 2 weeks ago got crapped into the toilet long ago.
I’d guess there are some folks in Britain freaking out. “OMG horse meat was in my mouth! I’ll never eat meat again. Puke, puke, puke.” “Wheres my lawyer, I want to sue their asses.” That’s just not my style. It happened. Deal with it and move on. Let the lawyers make their millions somewhere else.
I rather cut through the drama. The inspectors will crack down now that the problem is known. That’s really what matters.
We had a similar situation in the US in the early 1900’s. Upton Sinclair wrote the sensationalized The Jungle. Exposed all sorts of filthy practices and cost cutting like sawdust filler in hamburger meat. It lead to the modern US Food Inspection program.
But in Europe many horses are being raised for human consumption. The majority of horses raised in Spain, for example.
I do agree that the problem isn’t that it was oh-my-gawd-horse, but that there are things entering the supply chain which were not supposed to; I’d have the same problem if I found that my “100% beef burger” had duck or rabbit in it, and I eat both duck and rabbit - labeled as such! Also, if the horse being used wasn’t supposed to be for human consumption, that’s a second quality/health problem.
In the US, there is basically no check that a horse being slaughtered for meat has not been receiving medications that make it unfit for human consumption. For example, bute (a common equine NSAID) and practically everything in a recreational rider’s first aid kit is marked “DO NOT USE ON ANIMALS INTENDED FOR CONSUMPTION” in enormous letters. Then you have your steroids and and your diuretics given to many racehorses who end up slaughtered.
So the problem with American horsemenat is that it is, by and large, tainted with carincogens and bioactive compounds. And American horsemeat goes to Europe.
ETA: as a horse lover and a horse owner, I have no problem with horses being properly raised for food and eaten. They’re made of meat and are apparently tasty.
If “bute” is clembuterol, then it may be that what prompted the additional research. It has been cropping up in batches of beef for years, and while most often it did indeed come from the cows there were a few instances where nothing in the farms was positive for clembuterol (including the cows still there).
No, it’s Pheylbutazone, which is an all purpose painkiller and antiinflammatory. Clembuterol (brand name Ventipulmin) is a bronchiodilator and is also a commonly dispensed veterinary medication in the US, but not nearly so universally used as bute.
FWIW, I have eaten a lot of horse meat in my time. It is simply fantastic, and here in the Netherlands they sell a horse-meat sausage that is to die for.
However, as others have said, that meat I ate was clearly labelled as being horse meat.
Leaving aside whether the “extra” horse meat came from horses not raised for human consumption which might have been dosed with veterinary pharmaceuticals, the fact that there was a blatant breach of the rules and guidelines for food labelling is a very serious issue.
I don’t have a problem with eating horsemeat, as long as I know what I’m getting. I’m amused by the people who are now saying they’ll never eat meat again and have been vomiting all night at the mere thought of having eaten horse though. Obviously they didn’t know what it was and couldn’t taste the difference between that and a manky Tesco value burger…so why the need for such an extreme reaction?
As far as we know, the meat is perfectly safe for human consumption, and in the case of the value burger, you don’t expect to get much actual meat in it anyway.
I’ve eaten in enough other European countries to know that unless it specifically says “beef steak”, then you take your chances on what animal it actually came from. I know historically the UK has been collectively squeamish about eating horse, but realistically what’s the difference between that and any other animal raised for the purpose of consumption.
To be honest, it’s more of a marketing scandal than anything else.
Agree with all of the above that the issues here are health (bute contamination in particular) and consumer rights.
I don’t know anyone in the UK who cares about having eaten horse. The media whipped up their usual offense-for-pence shitstorm and no doubt managed to find a few ever-so-shocked members of the public to fraudulently support their hysteria, but no one really gives a shit. Lots of British people, including me, have eaten horse while in France and other places just across the Channel. Hell, I’ve eaten worse than that…
The trouble is that the manufacturer doesn’t seem to know what the meat contained. Once you get into the “mystery meat” category of ingredient, you lose any trust that the meat is safe to consume. The manufacturer lost control of their supply chain, you can’t do that when you’re talking about food. That’s how you get milk and dog food tainted with melamine.
That’s exactly the real problem. I mean, there is a big public ‘ick’ factor that’s mostly irrational, but the real problem is that a production process that allows horse meat to be sold as beef has strayed outside of critical control - there’s no telling what else could be going wrong.
But I largely agree with you about the morality of eating horse - I’ve had it in France and it’s nice.