Horsegate and Carry Over

This is a clear opportunity but one not totally without danger. What we don't need now is any testing that the Food Standards Agency and Local Authorities undertake tarnishing the good image of butchers.

There is a difference between blatant substitution and accidental inclusion. It is unlikely Scottish butchers would not blatantly substitute cheaper species meat to be passed off as the real thing. What concerns is the potential for cross species contamination showing up in tests.

Meat from beef, lamb and pork has been treated as meat. Historically pork products may have had traces of beef in them, beef products traces of pork. Religion compounds the problem and Indian carry outs have cases where beef has been substituted for lamb in curries.

Most butchers make batches of sausages one after the other and there is very little cleaning and disinfection between batches. Obviously moving between species will create potential for more than one species being present in the next batch of sausages because of the residual meat in the barrel of the mincer.

The tolerance in testing has been set by the Food Standards Agency at 1% i.e. 100g in a 10 kilo batch. It is set at 1% because this is the degree of accuracy that tests can go to with any robustness.

Lots of butchers make batches of speciality sausages in smaller batches. Therefore if a 5 kilo batch of Pork and Leek Sausages, for example, following on a batch of beef sausages gains 200g of beef sausage then the percentage of beef in the Pork & Leek Sausages could be 4%.

The same potential risk exists when making beef burgers and the likes of pork and apple burgers one after the other using the same mincer.

Take care what happens with your lamb trim. If it gets mixed in with your beef trim maybe your beef sausages should be labelled contains a small calculated percentage of lamb.

Please take care to avoid this happening and if necessary write something into your HACCP plan to cover this risk.

Meat manufacturers receive meat in case lots and take as gospel the labelling on the box. It would appear that in the Irish case maybe what was on the label was not what was in the box. It is stating the obvious but great care should be taken is you are receiving cases of meat that are not properly labelled or fully traceable. Please inform SFMTA if you have any doubts over what has been delivered to you of suppliers who are not labelling with full information on the outer of the cases or on the vac packs.

Consequence for labelling – will we get to the stage where all beef and lamb meat products would be labelled may contain traces of pork and that might not be helpful to consumers?