Utter chaos appears to be about to break out in the food processing industry across Europe and the UK as the slack and myopic attitude to their suppliers is finally being exposed. Following on from Tesco, Aldi and Asda withdrawing the beefburgers, Findus has now followed suit by calling back in its beef products.
At The Therapy Book, we’ve long suspected that there is a widespread problem in the food manufacturing industry which is like a bomb about to explode. As our non-GMO app has proceeded in development, we’re finding that a significant number of food suppliers find themselves unable to guarantee that their products do not contain GM ingredients or animals fed on GM feed.
The truth is that the food producers have to rely on their honesty of their suppliers to know what to put on the label, and as this latest scandal has shown, suppliers are not necessarily reliable. The system is rife too for fraud ~ with food manufacturers turning a blind eye and not investigating their suppliers properly.
Findus is the latest brand which is calling in its beef products in the UK ~ not just because the Brits, unlike the French, prefer not to eat horse, but also because some horse meat contains a dangerous chemical known as ‘bute’, short for phenylbutazone.
Once used as an anti-inflammatory for horses, phenylbutazone’s toxicity to some people led to it being banned. It is thought to be responsible for a serious blood disorder known as aplastic anaemia.
Horses treated with phenylbutazone are usually prevented from entering the food chain, by use of a sort of ‘horse passport’, which the vet has to stamp after administering bute. But after a leak from the meat trade last month, the Food Standards Agency here admitted that meat from eight horses slaughtered in UK abattoirs and intended for customers abroad, had been found to contain ‘bute’.
It’s our opinion that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and if the FSA was ever to apply themselves to honestly and thoroughly examine all the processed food on sale, the labels would almost certainly have to be revised.
In the meantime, we suggest that members and regular readers avoid processed foods altogether, and stick as much as possible to produce that’s reared or grown locally, and for which you know the provenance. It only takes a little more effort, but once you’ve got to know your local suppliers, and have them in place, most of the work is done and at least you can rest assured that your family is safe.
If this isn’t possible, and you need to continue with supermarkets, please regularly ask store personnel pointed questions about their goods, so that they know that you care and that they need to remain vigilant. Become the Shopper from Hell, from their point of view!
We just can’t trust in our institutions to protect us anymore, or in people having their hearts in the right place and doing the right thing, because, unfortunately, not everyone thinks like that. And as the pressure on supermarkets to provide ever cheaper food mounts, as it will surely will in the next few years, we have to make sure that standards don’t slip.
Shop GMO-Free in the UK app
We’re the first to bring out an app containing the GM status of more than 10,000 foods sold in UK supermarkets, Shop GMO-Free in the UK, which you can download for free here!
Endorsed by Steven Drucker, author of Altered Genes, Twisted Truth.
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