The Indelible Bonobo Experience

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Infographic: How Do You Know if Antibiotics Are in Your Meat?
- Column Five wrote in Food, Infographic and Lifestyle

According to the Food and Drug Administration, approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to livestock to promote faster growth and to prevent and treat disease. Mounting evidence now reveals that this widespread use of antibiotics, coupled with overuse and misuse of the drugs for human treatment has resulted in a new millennium health threat: a bacterial superbug resistant to antibiotics. Click on the infographic above to learn more about how antibiotics enter the food system and how you can help identify if they are in your meat.

yes, but the arsenic in chicken also makes us all Rasputins :)

There is no real logic as to why plenty of Britons are perfectly willing to eat cows, pigs, and chickens, but see horses as taboo, according to Dr Roger Mugford, an animal psychologist who runs the Animal Behaviour Centre. “I’m a farmer and there is an irony. Why are horses different from pigs and lambs?” he says. Part of the reason is people frequently see horses as pets, and humans tend to put “extra qualities and values” on animals they call pets, he says. (via BBC News - Why are the British revolted by the idea of horsemeat?)

• “It enables us to have yet another point of difference with the French,” says Gray. “Beef has long been symbolic of Englishness and therefore anything we can do or say to put British beef on a pedestal is usually done - ergo the thought that the French eat horse while we eat good beef becomes a chauvinistic way of asserting national identity,” she says.
• Gray, who lived in France for three years, says for her, it is completely natural to eat horsemeat as it was sold at her local butcher. “I am far more concerned with where the food is from. I would far rather eat ethically sourced, well-cared for horse, than battery chicken, for example,” she says.

Most brits aren’t revolted by the idea of eating horse. Journalists say they are, but they’re not. Give us more horse! And don’t waste those burgers!

Michael Capay, Steeple Morden

Two Romanian plants believed to be the source of horsemeat mislabeled as beef in supermarkets across Europe declared it properly and any fraud was committed somewhere else down the line, officials said today. Romania is scrambling to contain the damage from the fast-growing horsemeat scandal - where the cheaper meat was substituted for beef in everything from burgers to frozen lasagna. The finger-pointing is growing by the day, involving more countries and more companies. France says that Romanian butchers and Dutch and Cypriot traders were part of a supply chain that resulted in horsemeat being labeled as beef before it was included in frozen dinners including lasagna, moussaka and the French equivalent of Shepherd’s Pie. The affair started earlier this year with worries about horsemeat in burgers in Ireland and Britain. (via Romania: Slaughterhouses did not commit fraud - World - NZ Herald News)

• Horsemeat is largely taboo in Britain and some other countries, though in France it is sold in specialty butcher shops and is prized by some connoisseurs. Authorities aren’t worried about health effects, but it has unsettled consumers across Europe and raised questions about producers misleading the public.
• One of the slaughterhouses implicated, Carmolimp, said in a statement its meat was properly labeled as horsemeat, adding that it had not exported beef in 2012. It called attempts to blame it for the scandal “shameful,” suggesting that only an incompetent French meat processor would mistake the horsemeat for beef.
• Romania has some 25 horsemeat slaughterhouses and exports horsemeat to Cyprus, France, Poland and the Netherlands, often through middlemen, officials said. In deeply rural Romania, horses are sold from individual households to abattoirs, and each animal has four sets of documents before its meat is exported.
• Sorin Minea, who heads Romania’s main food producers’ association, claimed Monday in an interview that international gangs had perpetrated the fraud. “There is an international ring that does this… the documents (relating to the meat) are changed abroad,” he said. An expert would know the difference between horsemeat and beef and would be unlikely to mislabel it by accident.

Blame Canada! Blame Canada! :)