This is why I only eat organic chicken

[Too many words for you Gus, don't even try]

So what if it's legal? It's disgusting

The food standards agency is unable to tackle a greedy industry

Felicity Lawrence
The Guardian

There is an Alice in Wonderland quality to the latest food scandal this week. Large food processors, it turns out, have been adulterating our chicken and other meats with beef and pig waste for years. Another trick they know is how to take the chicken skin off the outside of the bird, hydrolyse it and inject it back on the inside. Magic. This is all so they can pump the meat full of water to make vast profits at our expense.
The food standards agency, which we might expect to be our champions in the matter of food quality, seems to think this is all right so long as someone mentions it on a label at some point. Except, of course, since they communicate in Euro-regulation speak, what the white rabbit actually says as he puts on his spectacles is: "This is a labelling issue and a composition issue. It is not a public safety issue." This has been the FSA line since the Guardian first revealed that large quantities of chicken bulked up with beef proteins and water were circulating widely in the the UK last year. No mention of how disgusting and unacceptable this is. Just a reassurance that it is legal so long as proteins are mentioned on the label.
Now, after months of investigation, BBC TV's Panorama, with the help of the Guardian, has filmed the director of a German company boasting that he can manipulate the DNA of the beef and pork waste in such a way that no government will be able to detect it in tests. Last night's programme, in case you missed the full technicolour gore of it, showed us huge Dutch factories churning out chicken that had been injected with beef and pig waste (in the form of hydrolysed proteins) and water, most of it destined for the UK.
Now the white rabbit pops up again to say that it will make the knaves have bigger, clearer labels. "Following surveys by the food standards agency on the adding of water with proteins derived from pork and beef to chicken, the European commission is to publish proposals to tighten the labelling on these products," the FSA website announced on Wednesday night.
Those processors which muck about with our food in this way will have to call it "chicken product with beef" or "chicken product with pork", the agency says.
But didn't the knaves say they could beat your tests and that you'd never catch them at it, asks Alice? What good is labelling going to do? And did we miss something in the chop logic, or is it not true that even if they do label this chicken for the wholesalers, who have connived in selling us chicken full of water for years, you and I are never going to see these labels? When this goopy meat and water and waste product ends up in my takeaway or restaurant meal, or in my child's school dinner, or in my ready meal, I will not see the label, will I?
Silence in court! "The proposal will also tighten the current requirements for labelling of water in chicken."
When the FSA was established three years ago in the wake of the BSE scandal, it was recognised that an independent body was needed to put the public interest first and to control the excesses of the food and farming industry. It set out bravely to be open and critical of industry where necessary. But now it seems to have slipped back into a damaging defensiveness, its hands tied by the power, and no doubt the lawyers, of the giant food companies.
The meat processing industry is running rings around both the FSA and the authorities in Europe. Instead of condemning this adulteration, our FSA has become caught up in a nightmare of Brussels buck-passing, where even the European commissioner for consumer protection is made to wait from July of last year till March of this for a response from the Dutch minister to his letter asking what the hell is going on.
The industry deploys its multimillion-pound resources to develop ever more sophisticated techniques to sell us rubbish. They hide the perverted aims of their ingenious research behind a veil of secrecy and call it commercial confidentiality. Dedicated but beleaguered public scientists, working with a fraction of their money, are always five steps behind.
Our food has become denatured and deracinated. We have little or no idea of the abuses that are regularly visited on what we consume daily. It would be comforting to be able to dismiss the madness of this industrialised system of production as nothing but a pack of cards, and wake, like Alice, from a dream, to find some protective agency to soothe our troubled thoughts. If only it were a dream. We must wake up to the reality and to the fact that no one but ourselves will sort it out. Don't buy cheap chicken.

Posted By: Old Git, Nov 16, 12:03:03