A Tobin tax may mitigate such speculation.

The big names? I doubt it. They may be guilty or not asking enough questions about the supply chain mind.



Pretty much because they don't have to, the dwindling resources for food testing along with cuts in inspectors and environmental officers should have meant more legislation to make retailers and food producers test, several governments dropped the ball here in the name of cutting red tape or not imposing more red tape.



Yup but the culture seems to have been don't ask, don't tell.



The trouble is that the supply chain is so vast that even the big boys can't keep their eye on it, take a simple lasagne, when we make on we know what goes in -

Pasta - Flour, egg, salt and water maybe.
Ragu - Ground beef, tomatoes, salt, pepper, herbs and a drop of wine maybe,
White sauce - Flour, milk, butter and salt.

Next time you are in a supermarket look at all the crap that a food processor puts in it and you'll know what the issues are, that's before you find out what they can get away with under "seasoning"



Welcome to real world supermarket tactics...
Artisan producers make a product and work out its sales price from what has gone into it, supermarkets start as a sales price and work back.

On the radio on Friday they were talking to a woman who said she would carry on buying these meals because they were cheap, she quoted £1 each from a frozen food supermarket. She couldn't make lasagne for 4 of them cheaper than she could buy it for, if I couldn't make lasagne for 4 for less than £4 I'd want shooting, and the more often you make it and in more batches the cheaper it gets.

Don't you find it strange that those who have previously championed the role of the supermarket in offering us "choice" and "value for money" have been so far, pretty much silent on this thread?

Its deafening...

Don't have an issue with eating Horse (never tried it, but would). I was listening to a phone in on radio and some woman from the Food Standards Agency said the main concern was if the horse was from racing it could have had injections of a drug that can cause nasty blood disorders in humans

Just to sumarise this thread for you



Being highly sceptical of any government statement that tries to minimise public concern, its highly likely that horse meat found in the human food chain that originated in Europe IS from unsubstantiated sources for the simple reason that horsemeat is a delicacy in Europe and is more expensive than beef, if anything we should have Europeans up in arms over the fact that their horse meat products have traces of beef in them.

As a food producer you wouldn't choose to pad out a beef based product with certified horse meat when you're trying to produce that product to a very tight budget, therefore there is only one source that it could come from, cheap, uncertified, uninspected, very likely illegal horse meat that should have been incinerated or sent to pet food manufacturers.

My understaning is that even pet food has to be "fit for human consumption"?

Hope the wife doesn't know this, she will be giving me cottage pie with Chappie in it

That's the theory, but given what we've been learning, what does that mean these days?

They've been offering us more choice than we knew about.

:32gcegdc

Waitrose own brand:

Minced Beef (18%), Cooked Free Range Egg Pasta (15%), Chopped Tomato, Water, Milk, Onion, Mushroom, Tomato Puree, Single Cream, Grana Padano Cheese (2%), Cornflour, Red Wine, Beef Stock, Butter, Wheat Flour, Garlic Puree, Basil, Salt, Olive Oil.

That £2.39 for 400g. So in essence, one portion.

Waitrose Essential:

Minced Beef (19%), Chopped Tomato, Cooked Free Range Egg Pasta, Water, Milk, Passata, Onion, Tomato Puree, Single Cream, Mushroom, Mature Cheddar Cheese, Cornflour, Wheat Flour, Butter, Rapeseed Oil, Red Wine Vinegar, Garlic Puree, Olive Oil, Demerara Sugar, Salt, Basil, Caramelised Sugar Powder, Oregano, Black Pepper, Ground Bay Leaf, Nutmeg.

£1.79 for 350g

Tesco Finest

Milk,British Beef (17%) ,Tomato Passata ,Free Range Egg Pasta ,Pork (10%) ,Carrot ,Onion ,Tomato ,Celery ,Italian Merlot Red Wine ,Tomato Purée ,Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese ,Mature Cheddar Cheese ,Vegetable Oil ,Sundried Tomato Paste ,Wheat Flour ,Beef Stock ,Sugar ,Basil ,Garlic Purée ,Salt ,Thyme ,Oregano ,Black Pepper ,Cornflour ,Bay Leaf ,Nutmeg ,White Pepper ,Mustard Powder ,Free Range Egg Pasta contains: Durum Wheat Semolina ,Egg ,Water ,Sundried Tomato Paste contains: Rehydrated Sundried Tomato ,Vegetable Oil ,White Wine Vinegar ,Garlic Powder ,Salt ,Black Pepper ,Rosemary ,Basil ,Beef Stock contains: Beef ,Water ,Cornflour ,Sugar ,Salt ,Beef Fat ,Onion ,Tomato

400g for £3.50

Tesco Everyday Value

Cooked Egg Pasta,Beef (20%) ,Tomato ,Water ,Tomato Purée ,Tomato Juice ,Onion ,Milk ,Cornflour ,Mature Cheddar Cheese ,Wheat Flour ,Single Cream ,Salt ,Beef Stock ,Butter ,Garlic Purée ,Oregano ,Black Pepper ,White Pepper ,Cooked Egg Pasta contains: Durum Wheat Semolina ,Water ,Pasteurised Egg ,Beef Stock contains , Mature Cheddar Cheese (1.0%) .

72p for 300g

So the largest percentage of beef is in the lowest price one.

Yes.

• All the above were taken straight from the respective online grocery sites, apart from Waitrose, which was from Ocado. Nothing about these lists – not even punctuation etc – has been altered.

When you look at the endless lists of ingredients for manufactured chilled or frozen food and then compare to a recipe for (say) a lasagne that would feed a family of four, you have to shake your head and wonder how we got to this situation.

And why do frozen foods need preservatives ?

Indeed. Part of the con has been people being convinced that those sort of prices are cheaper than anything they could make. Combine that with a loss of basic cooking skills. And the laziness that 'convenience' breeds.

I wonder with my mother whether, had there been more convenience food around in the 1960s and '70s (of the 'right' sort, obviously), we'd have been fed more like that. Nowadays, she readily says that she feeds herself and my father a vast amount of ready-made food. But she convinces herself it's fine because it's from M&S.

Which is an excellent illustration of how this is not a straightforward class issue, where we're just talking about it being the food of the 'working poor' or the non-working 'chavs'.

I was having a long chat with my parents (just over a year ago, one night in the bar of the Queen's Hotel in Leeds, as it 'appens) and the subject of food arose. It's a relatively safe one. I said something about how, over the last few years, I've got into the habit of making my own stock. My mother observed that, "well you won't feel like doing that when you're 80!" I hope that, if I'm still alive, then unless I'm doddery beyond doing anything (heaven forefend), I'll very much still be making my own stock. But I think that comment reveals a perspective of how she cannot imagine actually enjoying doing such things, never mind just appreciating the end result.

And I think that's partly the key.

I love seeing those programmes where, say, Raymond Blanc is back in his home village in France, and Maman Blanc, who is somewhat older than my mother, is absolutely still cooking. And while reality [imay[/i be different than perception, it never looks as though she finds it a dreadful bore.

The older I get, the more I want to cook and, increasingly, grow whatever I can. And stuff like this convinces me I'm right to do that, as well as it being enormously pleasurable and rewarding in so many ways.

I imagine the preservatives are in the form of binding agents, to prevent separation of ingredients as the product thaws & cooks and anti-oxidants to prevent oxidation spoiling the look of the product.

You have far to much spare time

You have far too much spare time

pah, says the man who posted the same thing twice!

Waited for over a minute and it did not post, so I did it again. Bloody computers.

What amazed me was the miles these cheap lasagnes etc. cover to get to our supermarket freezers.

The whole thing is bonkers.

I'm more amazed at the number of companies who make a profit out of each meal.
Some of this meat is going through 6 or 7 companies before it gets to the end meal.

Can be done, if you're good at a bit of horsetrading

I took the ingredients list to mean that 53% of the meal was 'minced beef filling', of which 22% was beef, making beef 12% of the total meal.

Not too surprisig when you consider the grade of beast that enters the food chain. The cheap mince used in burgers and value meals hasn't come from a beef herd, it's from knackered old dairy cattle, that sell for around 2 balloons & a goldfish at market

... and today's withdrawn product is ... Tesco Spag Bol. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21418342 As the report says ... "[iTesco took the frozen bolognese off the shelves =#FF0000when it found out Findus was concerned about the source of its meat processed by Comigel, based at Metz, north-eastern France[/i." ... am I being unreasonable to wonder why they hadn't spotted it themselves rather than keeping it on sale until Findus spotted a problem, especially given the other products Tesco has had to withdraw recently? Does this not suggest that Tesco have failed to check their full range of products that purportedly contain minced beef?

... and today's withdrawn product is ... Tesco Spag Bol. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21418342 As the report says ... "[iTesco took the frozen bolognese off the shelves =#FF0000when it found out Findus was concerned about the source of its meat processed by Comigel, based at Metz, north-eastern France[/i." ... am I being unreasonable to wonder why they hadn't spotted it themselves rather than keeping it on sale until Findus spotted a problem, especially given the other products Tesco has had to withdraw recently? Does this not suggest that Tesco have failed to check their full range of products that purportedly contain minced beef?