Grow Your Own Magazine

Just caught a piece on BBC Breakfast tv on how food labelling allows argentinian beef into this country to be 'processed' here and then it can be sold as scottish beef apparently. Also gave an example of how it could be welsh lamb sold to France and re-exported as French lamb.

So apparently you're not always buying British/local meat even if its labelled as such?

Tried to look on the BBC website but nowt else there.

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Manda.

"Wouldn't it be nice
For maybe an hour
To not have a care."

If that is the case, then theres no point in looking at labels really!!

Remember the recent bird flu thing at Bernard Matthews? Apparently he was bringing meat in from somewhere in Europe, and because it was being packaged in UK it was being sold as British meat. Also there was a thread on here recently about a Scottish shortbread maker taking English butter to Ireland for processing, shipping it to Scotland to make shortbread and then selling the finished product as Scottish. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

The thing that puzzled me about the Bernard Matthews business is whether he was feeding left over Hungarian birds to his English flock. How else might they have been infected?

Mad Cow disease started because cows were being fed dead meat and the whole thing is terrifying.

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Regards, Jane
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? The creative adult is the child who has survived.
Ursula LeGuin
http://www.etribes.com/madderbat

Mad cow disease is a prion disease, whereby the protein-like contaminant could only be spread by consuming infected meat. In particular, nervous material from an infected animal. Similar diseases are caught through cannibalism. However, bid flu is a virus that is spread though the air and direct or indirect contact between birds. Birds are rarely infected through consumption because it rarely reaches their throat tissue and is destroyed in their stomachs.

Your local farmers market "should" guarantee your meat and other produce is British. Our farmers market even sells ostrich meat from a farm only five or six miles away.

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I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
W. C. Fields

Our local butchers and farmers market guarantee the meat...

We have ostrich locally (Singleton in Lancs if anyone wants to know!) and wild boar from the Forest of Bowland.

The local butchers have a blackboard and it changes every week depending on where they've got the meat from.

It states something like: Pork: Watson, Three Bells Farm, Garstang (or whatever)

I actually recognise a lot of the farm names from driving to work (down country lanes). Quite a few stalls at the farmers markets have shops on site at the farms, so you can actually go and see the animals also...

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"Its not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you" - Bruce Wayne