Meat Scandals – Is anyone surprised?

One of the many strange jobs I’ve done…..

   ….is work as Production Manager in a large sausage factory! When I say ‘large’ I mean it was one of the main suppliers for a large supermarket chain.  Probably a strange choice for a young bloke who had just qualified with an Ecology degree but it has given me a great insight into the whole food / meat / traceability thing if nothing else.

  BS5750, replaced by ISO 9002 and more recently by 9001 (I think) is / was all about record keeping, quality control and traceability and this particular factory was really hot on it. I suppose they were quite lucky because nearly all of the meat was produced, butchered and processed on site so the issue of bits of horse turning up wasn’t really an issue. The only time that particular company bought in meat that was butchered elsewhere was during busy periods like xmas etc but even then it was a relatively small amount.

  All the animals arrived in the abattoir with their own unique ID saying where they had come from. However, it goes back much further than that – it would be possible to trace the batch numbers of every piece of feed that the animal had consumed in its life, where that feed came from, where the ingredients used in the feed came from, which operator had used the mixer that day… etc etc.

A pig ID tattoo

  At the other end, the code stamped on the pack of sausages would say they were made at our factory, along with another code which would allow QA within the factory to see which batch of animals was used in the sausage, details of the other ingredients, what time it was made, on what line and which operators were working on that line that made them. Plus temperature records etc, etc.

  The paper trail was / is comprehensive and occasionally very useful!

  However, the only time this system got a bit woolly was during butchery and it always concerned me a bit.  Imagine a whole pig carcass going into a butchery with 20 or 30 blokes working in it. Paperwork comes with the carcass but it quickly gets reduced to the various bits and sent here and there. At this point the tattoo on the pig or its ‘passport’ becomes pretty irrelevant – there is pretty much no way of telling which dissected pigs are which in a huge stainless steel bin containing just bits. This part of the trail relies on diligence and a conscientious approach alone and is the real weak link.  This weak point appears to be where the horsemeat fiasco has been allowed to happen at Findus etc.

  Like I said, never an issue where I worked as nearly all our meat came from our own abattoir and butchery, but somewhere else where random crates of pre-butchered frozen meat just arrived on lorries could allow all sorts of problems and abuses. The paperwork says it’s beef / pork and it’s all chopped up so how the hell are you going to be able to identify it as anything else? Unfortunately, the robustness of ISO 9002 / 9001 or whatever it’s called now has become the instrument of doom – such is people’s faith in the paper trail that the provenance of meat isn’t challenged.  Plus the pressure on meat buyers within companies to get cheaper and cheaper supplies must lead to quite a temptation to 'ask no questions'.

  I like horses, I like riding them but I’ve also eaten them and it doesn’t bother me. I think the story with meat products is ‘you get what you pay for’. Cheap sausages are simply pig skin, bread (or ‘rusk’ more technically) and the minimum amount of ‘pork’ which won’t be from the premium cuts. A nice Butcher’s Choice or similar though actually has mostly nice chunks of pork in & much less fat and bread.  So if you’re going to buy ‘economy’ products, you can’t really moan when you get something that is full of cheap crap! 

  Bit of a scary story here, especially if you are partial to a kebab after 14 pints on a Friday night…

  About once a month, I visit a local abattoir and fill up the car with meat for the doggies. They’ve always eaten proper meat and bone, not that dog food muck. That’s perhaps why they’re so fit and healthy.

  Anyway, one day I got home and was unloading 50kgs of pig and ox hearts from the car. Next door, the man from the local kebab shop was posting a menu through the letterbox, having worked his way along the whole street. He saw my haul and his eyes nearly popped out!  He asked where I got it, how much I had paid and got more and more excited! You could see his brain working overtime and I think you can see what I’m trying to say!

"Ello mate, donna or shish innit? Chilli sauce mate?"

 No more kebabs for me… unless I’m blind drunk obviously…