Pork dna has also been found in food labelled as beef, so there ya go.
It will be interesting to learn where the horse meat was sourced. Plenty of US race horses are slaughtered in Canada and Mexico, and are shipped elsewhere. As previously noted, most (former) race horses are pumped with drugs, nasty crap you sure as heck don’t want to be eating. I’m guessing at least some of the meat involved is from the US.
I actually wouldn’t be opposed to slaughter if the process, transport to and actual killing were humane, but they aren’t. Horses are shipped to auction and left in groups on lots for about a week. There’s a broad range of ages-from babies to senior citizens, all of whom have done nothing wrong except they have the misfortune of being unwanted. Dominant horses trample the more meek to eat all the food, so some horses starve for however long they’re there.
They’re led into a ring and bid on by kill buyers, unless there’s a breed rescue group looking for candidates to bid on, rehab and re-home. The “winning” kill buyers then load their prizes on trucks meant for cattle. There are many injuries enroute. At the slaughterhouse, they get to watch each other die and be gutted. When it’s their turn they’re shot in the brain with a bolt gun meant for a cow. Many times it doesn’t work the first time.
I **wish **I were exaggerating, but the horrors of this process have been well-documented.
Enjoy your horse burger.
You may have already eaten their asses, and not even known it.
Did that lunch at Taco Bell taste a little odd today?
So that’s why they call it a burrito! :smack:
“little donkey”
Honesty in the food chain is important for human health:
http://www.cnie.org/NLE/CRSreports/Agriculture/ag-104.cfm
Something I read seemed to say the horse meat was sourced from South America. (So that could be Brazil who have gotten very big into beef production as well). But, as has been stated, US horses are not raised as food animals. Here is a list of routinely used medications: http://www.vetsforequinewelfare.org/prohibited-drugs.php
Then there is the fact that if they’d lie about horse meat, then what other forms of protein will they mis-label and call beef? For all you know, that company may have met ends on some months by picking up loads from the local rendering plant (places the dispose of road kill, dogs, cats, etc, etc). I think falsifying a label should be a business ending violation.
In 2010 in the US 138,000 horses were slaughtered specifically for their meat, a bit less than 10% were thoroughbred racehorses (roughly 10,000). Horses weigh 1200 lbs each. You’d be lucky to get 20 pounds of meat off a good sized dog.
CNN is reporting the story now.
One sad consequence of this story is the tremendous waste of the recalled product. I hope CNN is exaggerating. It couldn’t be millions of packages of food could it? :dubious: Thats a lot of valuable food wasted simply because it had horse meat added. World hunger is such a problem and this food could do so much good. But it would be a PR nightmare to offer it to Haiti or other impoverished areas. Also the cost of keeping the food frozen, shipping, and distributing it would be too high.
My wife just made a valid point. Why pull the food from the shelves and spend money recalling it? Why not offer it free to the public? It would be cheaper than recalling the food and shipping it somewhere to throw out.
It would be so simple for each grocery store to put a free sticker on the recalled items. The public would snatch this free stuff up within a day or two. At least then it could be eaten and not wasted.
Because it’s possible that some of the meat was from horses that had been given drugs that were dangerous for humans to consume. There are also liability issues.
And a short RO break to golf clap
I’m still not clear how horse would be a cheaper substitute unless the horses they’re putting in are ropey as fuck.
I don’t understand ropey in this context? You mean tough, stringy? As far as that goes, you can’t tell after it’s ground up.
The reason it’s cheaper is that other people volunteered to shoulder the cost of breeding and raising and feeding the horse all these years. The meat buyer pays maybe $200-$300 at auction for a horse yielding 600lbs of usable meat. You think you can raise a cow to slaughter for $300? Good luck with that.
I meant ropey as in bad. So it’s elderly horses being put in the food supply? Does the age of a horse matter as regards safety for human consumption?
There are horses of every age and condition being put into the food supply.
Do you not understand that if the cost of raising an animal is effectively free, you can sell its meat for cheap? Horses in the US are not raised for meat (its illegal to sell horse meat in many places); they are always raised as companion animals or race horses. Someone other than the meat seller has taken on the cost of raising the animal to adulthood 100% of the time.
ETA: horse slaughter was illegal, but I guess slaughter was recently relegalized? I’m not sure.
Absolutely - has any British person here actually met anyone who is genuinely distressed about eating horse? - I haven’t and frankly I ain’t really seen anything apart from one nerverous, er, nellie;) being interviewed on Sky News once. But then again, if I’m totally honest I don’t really know any super nervous people because I am boisterous even when I try not to be and I scare them.
Not sure what you mean by “certified” but it’s absolutely legal to slaughter horse in the UK for human consumption (in fact this is done - indeed I saw an animal welfare vid a while back which was complaining about one of the slaughterhouses) and it’s absolutely legal to sell horse meat in the UK too (this is also done and easy to find on google). Whether you can buy UK horse meat in the UK I do not know but I would be astounded if there is a legal impediment to it, it would make no sense.
Oh I understand that fine, was just wondering how nefarious it is. I no longer eat meat but I wouldn’t be averse to eating horse if it’s safe to eat and labelled as such. I was imagining the sort of horses that would be going cheap would be disease addled is all. I’m aware too of the extensive horsemeat trade in France for one.
Most of the horses that go to meat are bought at auction. It is not necessarily the case that the sellers at auction realise that there are buyers there looking for delicious horse meat.
Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the [del]foal[/del] veal!
According to French TV news, there are two French companies involved and in both cases the contaminated beef was from Romania, bought via the Nederlands and Cyprus.
No cites.
According to the story above, there’s evidence it’s a deliberate fraud, run by Polish and Italian mafia gangs, who were coercing vets in abbatoirs into signing off horse meat as beef.