Greg Botelho and Janet DiGiacomo CNN February 9, 2014
Some 8.7 million pounds of meat from a Northern California company have been recalled because they came from “diseased and unsound” animals that weren’t properly inspected, a federal agency announced Saturday.
The recall affecting Rancho Feeding Corporation products — as detailed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service — marks a significant expansion of one announced January 13, when just over 40,000 pounds of the company’s products were recalled.
According to the U.S. agency, Rancho Feeding “processed diseased and unsound animals and carried out these activities without the benefit or full benefit of federal inspection.”
(Newser) – It may seem like everyone’s a vegetarian these days, but in fact, humans are eating more meat, a study finds. That’s because as China and India get richer, diets that had been heavy on rice have gotten more carnivorous. Still, we as a species “are closer to herbivore than carnivore,” says the lead author of the study, which “changes the preconception of being top predator.” Indeed, for the first time, Nature reports, researchers have assessed humanity’s trophic level—in other words, where we stand on the food chain.
Since they make their own food, plants and algae are at level one; mammal-chowing polar bears and orcas are among the animals at the top of the food chain, with levels reaching 5.5. Humans? Just 2.21 as of 2009, the study says. That makes us comparable to pigs, not to mention anchovies: We’re all omnivores. The study reviewed trophic levels in 176 countries every year from 1961 to 2009. During that period, our trophic level climbed approximately 0.06 points, a 3% increase. That’s a “big” difference, says an outside expert. It’s not good news for Earth: Livestock causes 18% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, more than all transportation combined, Nature notes.
Nuggets: Tim UR/Shutterstock; Close-up: kikujungboy/Shutterstock. Photoillustration by Matt Connolly.
Marketing isn’t about giving people what they want; it’s about convincing people to want what you’ve got—that is, what you can buy cheap, spiff up, and sell at a profit. Take the chicken nugget, that staple of fast-food outlets and school lunches.
The implicit marketing pitch goes something like this: “You like fried chicken, right? How about some bite-sized fried chicken chunks, without the messy bones?” When most people think of eating chicken, they think of, say, biting into a drumstick. What they get when they do so is a mouthful of muscle—popularly known as meat.
What people are actually getting from chicken nuggets is a bit different, according to a new study by University of Mississippi medical researchers. (Abstract here; I have access to the full paper but can’t upload it for copyright reasons.) They bought an order of chicken nuggets from two (unnamed) fast-food chains, plucked a nugget from each, broke them down, and analyzed them in a lab.
One of them contained just 40 percent muscle. The rest? “[G]enerous quantities of fat and other tissue, including connective tissue and bone spicules.” Mmmm, chicken bones.
The other sample had a whopping 50 percent muscle. The remainder consisted “primarily of fat, with some blood vessels and nerve present,” as well as epithelium, the stuff that glands are made of.
Now why would national fast-food chains be mixing bone and fat and whatnot into the chicken meat they grind into nuggets? I doubt anyone ever woke up and thought, “I’m craving some mechanically formed orbs of chicken parts, including meat, but also with plenty of fat, connective tissue, glands, and bone.” Offal is a lot cheaper than meat—the more you can work in, the more profit you can eke out of this popular menu item. Granted, people should eat more offal, as I’ve argued before. But (a) they have a right to know when they’re eating it; (b) one reason people eat chicken meat is because they think it’s lean—cutting it with chicken fat turns such eaters into suckers; and (c) bone matter, really? Bones are great when they’re gently boiled into highly nutritious broths and stocks. That seems like a much more reasonable use for them than hiding them in chicken nuggets.
I like the way the research team, doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, described the impetus for their study:
Mississippi leads the nation’s epidemic of obesity, and Jackson, Mississippi, the state capitol, is the epicenter. The metropolitan area, which has just over a half million citizens, boasts 50 different companies offering varying numbers of fast food outlets. Restaurant food restrictions are prohibited by state law. Because chicken nuggets are a favorite of children, and the obesity epidemic now extends to them as well, we thought knowing a bit more about the content of the contemporary chicken nugget could be important.
I contacted Tyson to ask about the composition of Fun Nuggets. A company spokesperson referred me to the National Chicken Council, which issued a statement in response to the Mississippi study. “This study evaluates only two chicken nugget samples out of the billions of chicken nuggets that are made every year,” the statement reads. “It is not scientifically justifiable to make inferences about an entire product category given a sample size of two.” It adds:
In making chicken nuggets, our members use quality ingredients and adhere to all food safety laws and regulations to create a product with high quality their customers and consumers expect. Chicken nuggets are an excellent source of protein, especially for kids who might be picky eaters.
The marketing of Fun Nuggets to kids has taken on a new and interesting form. In a recent sponsored post on a site that accepts “cash advertising, sponsorship, free products for review or other forms of compensation,” blogger Sara W. urged parents to pack their kids’ school lunches with Fun Nuggets. Each bag of the product, Sara W. reports, bears a label that can be clipped and “redeemed for $ .24 for your school!” Paging Anna Lappé.
Professor Mark Post holds the world’s first lab-grown hamburger. (Reuters/David Parry)
The data is piling up: Conventional meat (the kind that grows inside animals, not petri dishes) is not exactly good for our health. Research shows that regularly indulging in meat leads to a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, even cancer.
Professor Mark Post of the University of Maastricht, the scientist behind the first in-vitro burger, believes that test tube meat will be better for us. “We gain greater control over what the meat consists of, for example its fat content,” he says. “And the reduction in the number of farmed animals reduces the chance of zoonosis,“ or infectious diseases that spread from animals to people. So how exactly could meat grown in labs be better for our health than the meat that is grown in cows or pigs?
According to Joan Salge Blake, spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, one of the key factors is saturated fat. “If they are going to make their own fats, they will be able to replace the saturated fatty acids with, for example, omega-3 fatty acids,” she said.
While saturated fatty acids are known to contribute to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, omega-3s (found naturally in fish or flaxseed oil) are a healthier option—they reduce inflammation and may help lower risk of heart disease and arthritis. If Post is right, and in 10 to 20 years we have lab-grown burgers and sausages on the shelves of our supermarkets, they may well come in “no cholesterol” and “no saturated fats” varieties.
They might come in “no heme iron” versions, too. Post’s burger was most likely heme-iron free. In the future, he says, “it is conceivable that we will try and make reduced heme-iron containing meat.”
Conventional wisdom says that heme iron, the type of iron found only in meat and fish, is actually good for us. After all, it’s much better absorbed by the body than the iron found commonly in plants (called non-heme iron), and, as such, more likely to keep anemia at bay. Yet recent studies show that there is also a darker side to heme iron. If consumed, it may raise the risk of heart disease and some cancers. It has also been linked to type 2 diabetes.
“Both the iron and the fat content of the meat are likely relevant risks for this disease,” says Desley White, lecturer in dietetics at Plymouth University, and the author of a study on dietary heme iron which appeared in the July issue of Advances in Nutrition. She points out, though, that heme iron is only partly to blame for type 2 diabetes. “If you ate only cultured meat, heme iron-free, yet kept the same [amount] of activity, and stayed overweight, I doubt you would avoid diabetes, though you might delay it for some time. But if eating fat-free cultured meat would also mean a drop in calorie intake, then there would be an added decrease in diabetes risk,” she says.
It is also possible that the cultured meats of the future may not contain L-carnitine, a substance found naturally in red meat (but also present in much smaller amounts in fish, poultry, asparagus and avocados) —and that is likely good news, too. A study published in April in Nature Medicine showed that L-carnitine gets broken down by bacteria in the gut, and that a chemical resulting from this process ups the risk of heart disease.
If in vitro meats were produced using current technology, they could lack nutrients that are essential for good health. Post’s beef patty (which was really just a proof of concept), consisted only of muscle fibers. There was no fat in it, no blood or blood vessels, no connective tissues. This, according to Post, means that the range of nutrients in cultured beef would be different than in conventional meat. But he and his colleagues are working to change that. “Once all of these other components are included in cultured meat there is no reason for it to be less healthy than conventional meat,” he says.
Physician Neal Barnard, the author of several studies on red meat’s impact on health, believes that just like we now have orange juice fortified with Vitamin D, in the future we could heave cultured steaks or bacon fortified with Vitamin B12 (which we need to keep our nerve and blood cells healthy). “We have not looked into it yet, but it’s possible,” Post said.
Yet the story of healthy (or unhealthy) meats is not just a story of nutrients, of fats and of cholesterol. This story begins on farms. Nowadays, most animals raised for meat are raised in CAFOs—confined animal feeding operations. CAFOs not only lead to animal suffering, but also dirt, drugs, and disease. Workers employed in CAFOs may suffer from asthma, eye inflammation, and chronic bronchitis. That, obviously, would not be an issue for technicians growing meat in sterile labs.
What’s more, pollution from factory farms is a health hazard for surrounding communities. A study conducted in North Carolina found that people who live near hog farms have more headaches, runny noses, diarrhea, and burning eyes than those who live in cleaner neighborhoods. CAFOs also risk contaminating drinking water with nitrates from the animals’ waste. If ingested, nitrates may cause miscarriages, certain types of cancers, congenital malformations, and a “blue baby syndrome”—a condition which can cause comas in infants.
Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, points out that replacing CAFOs with labs will mean replacing dirt with sterility. “There will be health benefits for us, because this meat will be clean,” she says. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meat and poultry are the most common food sources of fatal infections, responsible for 29 percent of food-poisoning related deaths in the U.S., largely due to Salmonella and Listeria infections. Salmonella are bacteria that live in the intestinal tracts of animals such as cattle or poultry. When the animals are stressed (which happens often in CAFOs and slaughterhouses), they shed large amounts of this bacteria into their feces, which can contaminate the meat. Later, if it’s undercooked or badly handled, this can mean food poisoning. In recent months 134 people in 13 states were infected with a strain of Salmonella from chicken meat.
Eating conventional meat can also lead to listeria, E. coli or Campylobacter infections. It can mean toxoplasmosis (dangerous for pregnant women) or, in rare cases, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That doesn’t mean that lab-grown meat would be 100 percent safe, just much safer. Professor Amee Manges of the University of British Columbia, who has published studies on food-borne pathogens, points out that cultured meat could still get infected with bacteria during processing.
Cultured meat—at least produced the way Post does it—would also mean no growth hormones (banned in the European Union, but still approved for use in Canada and the U.S.), which according to the EU’s Scientific Committee for Veterinary Measures, can have “developmental, neurobiological, and carcinogenic effects.” Lab grown meat would not contain residues of pesticides (applied to the animals to control insects), no tranquillizers, no de-wormers.
For now, though, lab-grown meats still require the use of antibiotics. In conventional meat production antibiotics are given routinely to healthy animals to promote growth. They are used so freely, that according to the Food and Drug Administration, they now constitute 72 percent of all U.S. antibiotic sales. This, in turn, can lead to the emergence of resistant bacteria. Post’s lab-grown beef required antibiotics, too. “Cultured muscle has no immune system, so it was necessary. In the future, once production is scaled up and automated, it could be done in closed sterile systems so the antibiotics will no longer be needed,” he says.
With meat grown in sterile labs, we could also worry less about emerging diseases, such as avian flu and swine flu, which are associated with intensive farming. And if scientists could produce exotic meats like chimpanzee in their petri dishes, there would be less risk of retroviruses and herpes being imported with bushmeat into the U.S. from Africa. Right now, 180,000 pounds of bushmeat enters our country illegally each year. According to Post, growing exotic meats in a lab wouldn’t be much more difficult than growing beef or chicken.
Yet the problem is the “yuck factor” of what many already call “frankenmeat.” Some worry that we don’t know what eating stem cells may mean for our health down the road. Peter Verstrate, a food technician who worked with Post on the development of the cultured beef, reassures: “Stem cells are everywhere. In your muscle tissue there are stem cells, too. The only thing we do is take them out and tell them to multiply and to become muscle tissue. Just like they do in your arm or in your leg when you have a wound, to repair the muscle.”
(NaturalNews) Though clearly a move to protect its own profits rather than safeguard public health, industrial meat processor Tyson Foods Inc. nonetheless announced recently that it will no longer accept for processing cattle that have been treated with the growth-accelerating drug, Zilmax. According to reports, the company has recognized not only that cattle fed the Merck & Co. drug often suffer immense pain due to excessive weight gain, but also that many export countries like Russia and China do not want meat that contains any trace of the controversial substance.
The decision comes just months after rival Smithfield Foods, which is currently in the process of being acquired by a Chinese holding firm, decided to phase out the use of ractopamine, a similar growth-accelerating drug, in pigs following bans on the drug in both China and Russia. According to Reuters, Tyson’s announcement follows a similar lead, as Zilmax-treated cattle are increasingly being rejected both domestically and internationally due to their questionable safety record for human consumption.
Tyson officials claim the ban is being implemented to promote animal welfare, as many Zilmax-treated cattle are too overweight and deformed to even walk down the slaughter chute. But many media sources now believe Tyson’s true motive is to protect its export market by voluntarily withdrawing animals treated with the drug. In order to avoid losing considerable foreign market share in the coming months and years, in other words, Tyson has chosen to act first by rejecting a product that will cut into its export sales.
“There have been recent instances of cattle delivered for processing that have difficulty walking or are unable to move,” states a letter recently sent by Tyson to cattle farmers. “We do not know the specific cause of these problems, but some animal health experts have suggested that the use of the feed supplement Zilmax, also known as zilpaterol, is one possible cause. Our evaluation of these problems is ongoing but as an interim measure we plan to suspend our purchases of cattle that have been fed Zilmax.”
Like many other growth-accelerating drugs currently given to factory farm animals, Zilmax is a beta agonist, which means it mimics the action of naturally occurring hormones when ingested. Originally designed to treat respiratory ailments in humans, beta agonists work in cattle by altering their metabolisms and accelerating the rate at which they convert feed to usable muscle tissue. They also promote a higher conversion of feed into protein rather than fat, which leads to higher lean meat production.
Zilmax is just one of many beta agonists currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for administration in factory cattle. So even with Tyson’s new moratorium on this controversial additive, the company will continue to process cattle that contains other beta agonists, such as Optaflexx, which also unnaturally bulks up animals by speeding up the breakdown and synthesis of feed.
“Truck drivers have indicated that there is a difference between loading cattle depending on the beta agonist status of the diet,” says Lilly Callaway, an animal scientist who works for JBS, the world’s largest meat packer, as quoted by the weekly agribusiness newspaper, Feedstuffs. “Our plants have indicated that particular lots of cattle are showing up as ‘tender-footed’ — they do not want to move, seem lethargic and stiff, and have no energy.”
According to the Tyson letter, cattle feeders have until September 6 to either stop using Zilmax and maintain business with the company, or be cut off from being a supplier.
The era of exotic meats grown to order–with no animals killed in the process–could be on its way. This summer in London, Dr. Mark Post’s team from Maastricht University is at long last going to serve up the famous burger made from beef cells grown in a laboratory bioreactor.
The highly anticipated in-vitro meat has been under development for years, and the project has cost a reported quarter-million euros. Cells are extracted from living animals and cultured in the lab on a diet of glucose and amino acids, where they grow into small strips of muscle tissue. In order for the tissue to be more than a flabby gel, it must be exercised regularly. Thousands of the strips pressed together amount to a burger’s worth of meat.
Looking at how the sausage is made, be it traditional or lab-grown, is never appealing, But the potential here, for a world of delicious meat grown with no livestock involved, is pretty wild. CBC quotes Isha Datar of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to meat alternatives:
Datar envisions a future where techniques for growing in vitro meat are so advanced that it “could happen in an appliance in our own home” or in a bioreactor at a restaurant “Perhaps … it’s something like a brew pub and they’re brewing an in-house meat,” she said. “And we perceive that as being artisanal and unique and exciting.”
Because the Cruz-Biden talk-a-thon does mark a kind of unofficial start to the 2016 rubber chicken circuit. And, more importantly, both men currently have the best claim on their party’s id, if not its nomination.
Wildly different in style and separated by a generation in age, Cruz and Biden share a gift for the stump speech and for knowing what their side wants to hear. Under a different sort of “Friday Night Lights,” they give us the mood of the party bases in May 2013.
COLUMBIA, S.C. – Ted Cruz remembers the Alamo.
Yes, folks, he remembers the Alamo and the freedom fighters of Texas, and the South Carolinians who fought with them. He remembers the U.S. Constitution, and the protection it gives to gun owners and people of faith.
And make no mistake, Cruz remembers the transgressions of the Obama administration: the botched gun-running sting operation Fast and Furious, the health care law that tramples personal freedom and the drone strikes the White House uses to kill with impunity.
With this litany of conservative touchstones and more, Cruz drew round after round of applause Friday night here at the South Carolina GOP’s Silver Elephant Dinner, an annual fundraising event that routinely hosts aspiring presidential candidates.
It remains to be seen whether Cruz’s keynote speech represents an early step toward seeking the presidency.
What it was, for now, was one more successful stop on the rubber-chicken circuit for a Republican who has become a master of political dinner theater with an act that should give real pause to party bigwigs who think a remodeled GOP 2.0 is just around the corner.
Every Drudge-linked, Fox-hyped, Rush-endorsed zinger a Republican county activist could want – Cruz delivered it here.
Beginning with the tale of how two South Carolina-born officers, William Travis and James Bonham, helped lead the doomed fight at the Alamo, Cruz expressed his gratitude to the Palmetto State.
“Thank you for the support South Carolina has given, then and now, as we fight side by side,” said Cruz, who also compared conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint to the legendary American revolutionary known as the Swamp Fox.
It was the bill of particulars against Obama that really got Cruz – and the Silver Elephant attendees – going in earnest.
Pointing out that Obama said this week in Mexico that American guns fuel violence across the border, Cruz jabbed: “I would suggest a place he could have started, was not to have his Department of Justice selling guns to Mexican drug cartels.”
By now you’ve likely heard about the horse meat scandal that is rocking Europe. As far as food scandals go, this one is intriguing. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve learned that the meat we buy may not be everything we thought it was. Remember “pink slime”? The only good news here is that, so far, it doesn’t seem to be an imminent health threat, although it does raise some very alarming questions.
As food politics expert Marion Nestle wrote, “The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. Cultural identity? They (other people) eat horsemeat. We don’t.”
As Nestle explains, “Most Americans say they won’t eat horsemeat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.” Horse meat, however, is eaten in numerous countries around the world like China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as countries in Europe, including France and Switzerland.
It’s one thing to knowingly eat horse meat; it’s quite another to have it slipped into your food. This opens a pandora’s box of questions about the food we"re buying. For starters: What else is in there (donkey and pig, and the list may grow)? What does it reveal about food safety and our complex food chain? Who is responsible for duping consumers, and how did they get away with it?
It turns out there is a lot we can learn from Europe’s surplus of horse burgers.
1. The Mighty Fall
The most recent news surfacing today is that Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world, has now been entangled in the scandal. The New York Timesreports that Nestlé is pulling two products sold in Italy and Spain: Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, as well as Lasagnes à la Bolognaise Gourmandes sold to catering companies in France.
Nestlé is just the latest in the list of Europe’s top food companies involved. The story first broke in the UK and Ireland when major supermarket chains Tesco and Aldi were found to be selling beef products that contained horse meat. It spun from there. AdAgereports, “Burger King binned thousands of Whoppers and Angus Burgers, which were sourced from the same Irish beef supplier, Silvercrest, and Findus ‘beef’ lasagna was found to contain 100% horse meat.”
Silvercrest has been fingered, as well as Liffey Meats in Ireland and Dalepak in Yorkshire, accordingto Felicity Lawrence of the Guardian:
Silvercrest and Dalepak are both subsidiaries of ABP Food Group, one of the largest beef processors in Europe.”
… Huge blocks of frozen meat at a cold store in Northern Ireland, Freeza Foods, which had been quarantined by officials suspicious of its labelling and state of packaging, were found to contain 80% horse.
Other top food companies were implicated when the scandal hit France (more on that soon), but the presence of large food companies at the heart of the issue is troubling. While bigger companies are often able to offer products cheaper than small and local stores, some may be questioning if the savings are really worth it if consumers are getting duped. A look at the complex supply chain raises even more fears.
Supermarket buyers and big brands have been driving down prices, seeking special offers on meat products as consumers cut back on their spending in the face of recession. The squeeze on prices has come at a time when manufacturers" costs have been soaring. Beef prices have been at record highs as has the price of grain needed to feed cattle. The cost of energy, heavily used in industrial processing and to fuel centralised distribution chains, has also soared. There has been a mistmatch between the cost of real beef and what companies are prepared to pay.
So, are we really shocked?
2. A Tangled Web
Horse meat has ended up in so-called beef products to varying degrees — some have been found to contain traces of horse DNA, which may have been the result of processing plants not properly cleaning equipment. And some products have been found to contain upward of 80 to 100 percent horse meat, which signals a much larger problem.
Getting to the bottom of how this came about has involved a lot of finger pointing. In Ireland, the ABP Food Group blamed supplies in Netherlands and Spain, and later Poland. “Five weeks into the scandal and the links in the Irish chain have still not been fully established,” writes the Guardian"s Lawrence.” But this gets even more interesting in France, as she explains:
Comigel had subcontracted its ready meal production to a factory in Luxembourg, Tavola. It was supplied with meat by a company called Spanghero. Spanghero had bought meat from a Dutch fraudster already convicted of passing horse off as beef, Jan Fasen.
The Dutch trader ran a company called Draap, which spelled backwards is paard or Dutch for horse. It was registered in Cyprus in 2008, with an offshore vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. It emerged during Fasen"s trial in Holland that he had supplied French companies with horsemeat imported from South America and Mexico fraudulently labelled as Dutch and German “beef” going back to 2007.
The horsemeat found in the recent tests on ready meals exported from France was said to have been sourced by Draap from Romania. The Romanian government has said its meat was legally exported correctly labeled as horse. The French government said Spanghero was the first agent to stamp the horse as beef; Spanghero has denied doing so deliberately. Fasen says Spanghero and French manufacturers were in on the deception from the beginning.
It turns out there may be a whole lot more criminal to this case.
3. Trouble in Romania
It just so happens that Romania may have an excess of dead horses on its hands. John Lichfield of the Independent reports that a change in traffic rules is to blame:
Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the abattoir after the change in road rules.
The law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among food-industry officials in France that some of the “horse meat” which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may, in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. “Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
While the explanation of where some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield explains, “It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”
4. Blame the Mafia
From here, the story just gets weirder. Jamie Doward reports for the Observer that organized international gangs are suspected of involvement in the scandal. Doward writes:
Experts within the horse slaughter industry have told the Observer there is evidence that both Polish and Italian mafia gangs are running multimillion-pound scams to substitute horsemeat for beef during food production. There are claims that vets and other officials working within abattoirs and food production plants are intimidated into signing off meat as beef when it is in fact cheaper alternatives such as pork or horse. …
“I"m concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we"ve really got to get to the bottom of it,” [Britain’s environment secretary Owen Paterson] said.
5. Rethinking Our Food
So, we found out that beef products may contain horse, and also pig, and possibly donkey, as well. What to do with that information? For some people, it means buying less meat or from different sources. Reuters reported that 60 percent of people it surveyed in the UK said they were turning to local butchers for their meat and 25 percent said they would buy different cuts instead of processed meat.
AdAgereported that sales of frozen burgers dropped 40 percent in the beginning of February, while the meat-substitute Quorn saw a spike in sales of 10 percent. Emma Hall writes that, “More than two-thirds of British adults said they would be less likely to buy frozen meat products in the future.”
The biggest effect so far has been a drop in public trust. But after countless food safety scandals over the years, some of them deadly, why do we trust a system that’s needlessly complex?
“The food and retail industries have become highly concentrated and globalized in recent decades,” Lawrence writes for the Guardian:
“A handful of key players dominate the beef processing and supermarket sectors across Europe. They have developed very long supply chains, particularly for their economy lines, which enable them to buy the ingredients for processed foods from wherever they are cheapest at any point, depending on exchange rates and prices on the global commodity markets. Networks of brokers, cold stores operators and subcontracted meat cutting plants have emerged to supply rapidly fluctuating orders ‘just in time.’ Management consultants KPMG estimate there are around 450 points at which the integrity of the chain can break down.”
That’s worth repeating — there are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands.
If there was ever a reason to eat more locally produced food and to know where your food comes from and who grows and processes it, this would be a damn good one because this extends far beyond just meat products, and far beyond Europe.
