- Supermarket says it is angry with supplier Comigel after tests reveal 30% and 100% horsemeat in withdrawn ready meals
Not to be a party pooper, but this happened in way back in the golden era of 2013. Old news. Round the same time that Ikea had the same issue. Aldi corrected it pretty fast. Anyhow, their prices? I'd still hit it. What's so bad about horse, anyway?
Never has there been a more appropriate use of the #wheresthebeef tag.
The problem is that nobody important goes to jail. The company that did this gets a small to medium fine and all is well. The CEO of this company should be more exposed because when its his ass on the line hes going to make darn sure there isnt fake shit in the product. Personalty have no problem with the horse meat but clearly the customers were paying for beef and got scammed with a lower quality meat that may not be food grade which is the bigger problem.
The problem with holding a company criminally liable for anything is finding exactly who was the cause of the issue. According to this wiki page for Comigel, the contaminations were a result of meat from suppliers. Did they know that they were being supplied with horse meat? If not, is the supplier in trouble for fraud, or is the processor guilty due to their inability to screen their meats? Also, from how high of a position was this decision made? Was it not a "contamination" and did the CEO know about it, or was it due to the laziness or cheapness of someone under him? Who was really at fault for the issue? In other cases, it can be even more hazy. If a faulty product kills someone, whose fault is it? Is it the person making it, because they did a bad job? Is it their supervisor for their failure in properly training employees? Is it QA, because they didn't catch the fault? Is it the plant manager for having incompetent staff? Is it the CEO of the contractor for having incompetent plant managers? Is it the CEO of the main company for hiring lazy contractors? Even then, is it the CEO that's the problem? When someone goes out and deliberately frauds or harms another person, it's easy to throw the guilty party in jail, because it's one or a few people whose guilt can be determined. When a company does it, finding the individual at fault is finding a needle in a haystack, because it involves figuring out who, in a sea of hundreds of people, are responsible for a single decision.
Its really easy for noone to be responsible for quality/safety because everyone is responsible. Thats why the buck needs to stop at the top and the CEO needs to be held responsible. He gets paid the big bucks so he needs to be held accountable. IF he doesn't want the responsibility and liability then he shouldn't get paid the money. In cases like this suppliers CEO/upper managers should go to jail and Comigel's CEO should be let go without receiving any bonus and loose any options.
When I was a kid we had family in the Air Force and they were posted to Germany and we visited a couple of weeks. At that time they used to sell horse meat sausages. No idea whether they still sell that, but they certainly didn't back in the UK. They were the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted. After the holiday I was upset that I couldn't find them at home. I've never understood why people are OK with eating cows but not horses. I do understand that people would feel duped buying one thing as advertised and finding it's something else, but I don't understand the moral outrage. Prseumablty whoever provides it can get horse meat cheaper, otherwise why bother? Anyone know why horse meat would be cheaper?
Is there no quality assurance in the supply chain between Comigel, Aldi's, and any third party distributor? Or are there no specifications set by the customer (Aldi's)? Sure, be angry, but something could have been done in this process to prevent a 100% horsemeat product from ever being mislabeled.
I would argue that if you can't tell the difference between horse and beef in your lasagna, the choice of meat might not matter that much. I love chorizo. I made the mistake of reading the ingredients once. It's, like, pituitary glands and chile powder.
No meat is sacrosanct. It's all meat. What's really the difference between a horse and a cow? One is food just because and one isn't because of our relationship to the animal. It actually makes a lot of sense to eat dog. Dogs are economical to feed and of limited utility to certain cultures. Cat more so. Cats are useless. If this happened in India with cows there'd be riots in the streets but we basically torture cows and few people seem to care. I'm not going to eat my dog or start looking at the haunches of cats down at the pound to assess tenderness, but the death of one animal or another doesn't bother me too much. I watched Earthlings and was only disturbed once or twice. I'm committed to my vices in spite of being fully aware of the risks and reality of their horrors.
This is more of a supply issue than anything else, not a meat issue. This can happen to really any product. It might be an argument for raw food diets, where you can visibly see the product every time like peas and corn, and generally yes vegetarian/vegan diets will have more of these types of food in them, but sometimes even if it's not meat you have no idea. Like the one time I ordered loose leaf tea and ended up with a bag a quarter full of tobacco. I guess steeping tobacco doesn't get you nicotine because I didn't realize it until half way through the small bag. Then again, I might not have hit the tobacco yet, a large portion of it was definitely black tea.
If it was all tobacco you would have gotten sick. I tried to dye paper with tobacco and handling the mixture made me nauseous and I smoke a lot. I also filtered a cigarette out of a glass of whiskey and threw up immediately when I drank it. That last one probably doesn't count for much. I just rarely find myself in a situation where I want to admit doing that.
Girlfriend's dad once read that you could keep bugs off your plants with a tobacco tea spray. So he boiled a can of Skoal wintergreen in a pot of water and misted the apple tree. It was years before the tree bore fruit again... And the kitchen never smelled the same.
I don't know how much of it was, but I saw a decent amount of loose tobacco at the bottom of the bag and a smoked cigarette with chinese lettering on it. I think I mostly drank the real tea on the top and probably didn't even get to the tobacco. The company said they had a disgruntled employee that did it. They aren't in business anymore.