I've been wondering about this horse DNA and how much contamination is required to result in finding horse (or pig) DNA in other products. Anyone here any idea?
Before the 60% burgers etc. a fuss was being made about this but surely it will arise from imperfect cleaning of equipment. Rather like the warning on many foods to allergy sufferers nowadays ('this product was produced in a factory where nuts are used...') and there will always be cross contamination at DNA levels.
I have no idea but some lasagna was 100% horse. I would have thought before all this episode that the machinery used would either be cleaned properly or only one type meat processed on each machine. Now I would be surprised if they did any cleaning at all.
You seem to be looking for an innocent explanation when I suspect there isn't one, or at least isn't one for every instance.
You don't work for Findus, by any chance?
To the OP - you are of course correct.
It's more about how little beef DNA there is in a product labelled as containing beef.
That said I'm more worried about the whole question of traceability of what the EU told us was supposed to be a foolproof system. I don't mind a bit of horse suitable for human consumption and to me this would be far better than beef that is unfit for human consumption.
That said we only tend to buy our meet from the farmers market.
Anything over 1% is considered contamination.
Have to be honest here, am i the only one who thinks it's not really that bad of a thing, i tended to worry about the meat in a lot of these things beforehand anyway, but because there was so little meat, it was all grizzle or whatever, at least with the horse thing it means there's more meat!
It's the issue of traceability that is most troubling. There's a definite sense that in some cases criminality rather than lax standards is involved, and this makes it pretty difficult to have any feeling of security about what's actually been thrown in the mincer.
Actually eating horsemeat is not going to harm any of us....In some European Countries horsemeat is as common as us buying Lamb, Beef or Pork.
I have ordered horse and donkey knowingly in European restaurants and found it very tasty.
The real issue here is that the horsemeat that has found its way into our food has traces of bute...a drug given to horses as a painkiller...this is very harmful to humans!
No, I'm not involved in this (or any related industry), just curious. Obviously if there is a certain percentage of horse in beef then something isn't right but there could be an innocent explanation for levels only detectable by DNA analysis - forensic scientists can obviously detect DNA at levels well below 1%. The only way to avoid this would be to have totally separate production lines.Originally Posted by Seabadger
Hopefully the public will accept that trace levels of contamination are acceptable and probably unavoidable.
I have stopped eating burgers and ready-meals, never really ate sausages.
I have had the urge to jump over the odd hedge and fence lately, so I am a
bit concerned what I have eaten.
Surely Tesco and the other supermarkets are open to being sued by consumers
for selling horse as beef.
Given that the food industry has been happily putting horse in the mix, I'd be more worried about the quality of the actual beef. What faith do you have that they aren't putting any old not-for-human-consumption cow into the mincer? No DNA testing is going to spot that, and those 'basics' lasagnes are suspiciously cheap don't you think?
When did anyone on here buy a value lasagne? They're pretty poor fair even if they did contain all beef?
Food regs in the UK are supposed to be really strict and suddenly they've been found wanting because the testing hasn't been done and crooks have taken advantage.
I'm quite happy to buy the premium sausages and burgers. It all looks like proper meat anyway.
A few of the people I've been speaking to have said they've heard the problem doesn't lie with the fact that horse meat has been used, rather it's more that the horses have been potentially injected at some point with chemicals that aren't fit for human consumption.
Now I would caveat this by saying that these people claim to have some insider knowledge. However the fact that I've not seen much being reported along these lines along with the fact that no one has been reported ill (as far as I'm aware) makes me slightly dubious!
Still, another angle to think about.
From my point of view, as others have also expressed, I wouldn't be against eating horse if horse is what I was expecting to eat. However if I was expecting to eat an Aberdeen Angus burger which turned out to contain horse meat then I think I would be pretty annoyed!
Phenylbutazone (sometimes called bute), an anti-inflammatory drug. It can cause serious haematological (blood) disorders in humans and is very rarely used now (it is still licensed for a condition called ankylosing spondylitis and not banned in humans, despite what the media have said). it is used in the equine world as a painkiller, so the theoretical risk is that is can get into the food chain. It would, though, take an enormous amount of contaminated horsemeat to cause a problem in a human.
To my mind, the issue is one of (fraudulent) mis-labelling and thus not knowing what I am buying. Meat is meat but I want to know what it is. The health "risks" are minute at worst.
One thing this has all shown is that we should be selling and eating horse in this country. I have only (knowingly) eaten it once and thought it was lovely. Clearly people hadn't stopped buying these products until recently though and thought they tasted good enough to continue buying, which by my perfectly sound reasoning deduces the British public like eating horse. Of course with all the flavour additives they could probably make any meat taste like any other.
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