Ah just throw it in the bin

Foodwaste! God how it bugs us all but yet we keep throwing out food.
We don´t mean to waste money. We don´t mean to ignore food in the fridge. We don´t mean to be wasteful, We don´t mean to overshop but we do.



To varying extents, all of us waste food. I am a complete scrooge but at some stage during the week I will still throw something into the bin that should not be there. Most of the time I think I´m great on the food waste issue but actually I´m not. I´m pretty medium rate. I make the "it goes to the dogs" excuse. We have two dogs which are very good at eating anything that falls on the floor, let alone scraps from plates. Unfortunately remembering to cut the Labrador´s food after half a bowl of scraps doesn´t always occur. So we´ve one fat dog and one anorexic terrier which is pretty much the way terriers are.

Some vegetables can go to my two rescue horses but as they are in work and as one is pretty fussy carrots are about the height of it. One thing I am very good at is shopping strategically and planning meals. I just make too much each time. Yes I freeze and make large batches to have later but often serve portions which are too large, particularly to my two children. Watching them say they are full when their plates are still laden with food, it´s tempting to make them suffer it out and eat the lot. But as we now know, this method employed by our parents is a dietary no no. (oh how I suffered at the table with gerbil cheeks full of spinach) so it´s back to the dog´s bowl it goes or into the bin.


Sometimes I get it really wrong - an untouched iceberg lettuce weeping in its wrapping at the back of the fridge and even today - some pork belly I bought which I was really looking forward to roasting tonight with Roosters and beets is somehow three days past the date. How did that happen? Why didn´t I put it in the freezer?



So we know it´s a problem but why do we keep doing it? Perhaps we don´t know Exactly how much it costs. Well now em, we do.

For the past six months by other half, journalist and co-author of the original  Basketcase Philip Boucher-Hayes has been filming a documentary for RTE on food waste in Ireland and examining strategies to curb it. When you tot up the figures it seems that in this country that of every three bags of groceries we bring into the house, one goes in the bin. Yep, throw it in, just like that. The other shocking figure is that according to the EPA - half a billion euros, yes, half a billion, could be saved if we got control of the problem.



As it´s such a large issue spanning everything from hospital food to high end restaurants one of the challenges in making the series was how to reach into our - the viewer´s own shopping and eating behaviour. So the series picked one town - Killorglin in County Kerry to focus on and take case studies of families in terms of what is coming into their house and what is going into the bin.

Here´s the promo for the documentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT00WR5hk9k

It´s interesting frankly to see your own behaviour reflected back at you. Everyone has issues with food waste and it goes on in every kitchen. In a country where one in ten people suffer from food poverty its an uncomfortable situation. Philip´s documentary - Waste Watchers is on RTE 1 television is on this 

Sunday at 6.30. 

The American burger is unsafe to eat. Unless we get our food system in Europe under control we're heading the same direction

[This post is based on an Opinion piece I wrote in the Irish Independent on Saturday, it has been updated to include the latest updates on horsemeat] 

As Irish horse slaughterer B&F Meats was announced on Friday to be re-packaging horsemeat for export as beef, it seems the crisis is back on our doorstep here in Ireland. What we feared might be the case - Irish equines going illegally into the food chain has proved to be true, and there will be further  resulting ramifications for the food sector, let alone legal and perhaps criminal fallout. 

Foods sold in Ikea and Birds Eye are the latest big name brands to find horsemeat in their products. As we are drip fed more information about the scale of the horsemeat problem, Irish consumers feel unsure about what other nasties may lurk in our shopping trolleys.

At the heart the horsemeat issue is the real cost of cheap food. Much of the comment has centred around “if you eat cheap food, well what do you expect?” But

research shows value ranges and cheap food are not just purchased by the 10% of Irish people living in food poverty (Dept of Social Protection). They are bought by ordinary families whose pattern of shopping is based on value and are now worth 46% of our €8.9 billion grocery market.

Food itself has become cheap, and Irish consumers across many income brackets buy own brand or discounted value ranges. This scandal has revealed that it’s becoming harder to pin the problem on simply cheap burgers and consumers are listening to contradictory advice. In between refuting the FSAI’s claims that his burgers tested positive for horsemeat, Malcolm Walker head of retail chain Iceland told BBC this week that he wouldn’t eat other UK supermarket’s value lines as “there’d be other things in there”.

Dumped meat products

The pressure on food to be cheap across the board and moves towards less regulation and testing are at the heart of the problem. As we’re drip fed more brands containing horsemeat, farm ministers in Brussels were wrangling with the CAP budget which pays farmers to produce for retailers at knockdown prices. The EU’s cheap food policy has worked to a fashion – to deliver affordable food to consumers, but how can we say it’s a success when the player closest to the consumer – the supermarkets, are the ones taking the most margin?  Subsidising farmers and paying for proper regulation at least ensures good food quality at farm level. Farmers and farming programmes currently get 42% of the EU budget. It will be less this year and by 2020 set to be reduced to 33%. So as we reduce subsidy, and food gets more expensive to produce, how on earth do we think quality or food safety is going to improve?

As has been asked many times “Why have CAP? Why pay farmers for producing food whatsoever?” Well let’s look at the US, where subsidy exist only for particular foodstuffs like fructose corn syrup which strangely dominates snack foods, food manufacturing and is blamed for America’s obesity epidemic. US is the free market unregulated end of the model. It is also the model with the most problems for those who eat its food.

Tyson Foods

The involvement of American beef giant JBS in the horsemeat crisis is hardly a surprise. Last year one of their biggest beef processors Tyson Foods was found guilty of using false books and bribing meat plant inspectors. US beef contains antibiotics and steroids, and in the opinion of most American food writers the iconic American burger is unsafe to eat.

Massive recalls of beef for ecoli and chicken and salmonella tainted eggs characterise a regular year in the US food chain. Recent research by the University of Minnesota found evidence of fecal contamination in 69% of the pork and beef and 92% of the poultry samples in retail outlets. Factory farming is blamed for large scale antibiotic resistance in the human population while the use of “pink slime" in burgers - mechanically recovered meat treated with ammonia was recently dropped by MacDonald’s in the US after public outcry. 

pink slime filler

Liberalisation of farming and food manufacture has been a disaster for US consumers.  Americans get sicker and die younger than people in any other wealthy nation. Even the best-off Americans – those who have health insurance, a college education, a high income and healthy behaviour are sicker than their peers in comparable countries, says a report by the US National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

Light touch regulation doesn’t work in food. Under the Tory Government the UK’s Food Standards Agency’s budget has been slashed and food testing fallen in some areas by up to a third. In Ireland we have maintained rigorous tests on farms by the FSAI and EHOs. As food companies become more vertically integrated and dominant, it’s crucial that budget for food regulation and standards in production and manufacture are not only maintained but scaled up in Ireland and the EU.

In recent years the Department of Agriculture insisted in there was plenty of legislation in place for the identification of horses going into the food chain. In the wake of the present crisis I asked if they have plans or budget for more checks at factories and putting vets back on ports? The answer was no.

Regulation and upholding standards on farms, subsidising farmers properly to produce food above the cost of production are essential to maintain a food chain that’s safe. We may not like where we’ve got in our food picture but by further letting go of the reins we will pay for it, in the realm of our own health. 

Hate to say I told you so #horsemeat

One of the frustrating things about Europe's current horsemeat crisis is that welfare groups in Ireland warned the Department of Agriculture many times about the problems of horses being transported live to Europe. These animals were known not to have passports and dealers openly admitted (also documented in the UCD report of 2010) that forging passports to get horses into factories wasn't an issue.

For many years I have helped the Irish Horse Welfare Trust to try and heighten awareness of the neglect of horses and the issue of live transport. For cattle and sheep transported to Europe or elsewhere there are strict regulations on travel times and welfare, none of which exist for horses. Horses are not checked at Irish ports before they travel for health or individual identification. This free movement of horses under the tripartite agreement between England, Ireland and France was identified in the UCD report as detrimental to bio-hazard controls - laughable now we have proof that many of these horses were going for human consumption. Authorities here denied that Irish horses could be going into the food chain until a Dutch processor in Nijnegan was revealed last week to be selling Irish and Dutch horsemeat as beef. This piece of news closed the circle in effect, though it's still not clear whether this meat came from carcasses killed in Irish abattoirs or from the live trade.

www.IHWT.ie

What we also know is that of the five Irish plants who were granted licenses to slaughter horses to cope with the surplus of horses after our boom years, only two are operating horse slaughtering at present. Why? Because there are much larger numbers (the department estimates around 16,000 horses) going out live on lorries to Europe.

horse transport

If 12500 equines were killed in licensed slaughterhouses (excluding the knackery system) here in 2011, why the larger number of animals going for live transport with its additional costs? Think about it. You have to have a passport (albeit very easy to obtain) to bring a horse to a factory here. Not so if it is killed abroad, even in the UK. The USPCA have identified false passports and forged veterinary signatures used on passports of animals going on the live trade, some which have been dosed with bute or other drugs. So of course the numbers are bigger - it's far easier to get them into a factory in Poland or Italy than in Ireland, as loose as the system here is.

I have two horses, both of whom I could apply for a passport for tomorrow from the 12 agencies allowed to issue them and get both into a factory next week. That's no reflection on B and F Meats et al. It is an illustration of how the passport and identification scheme doesn't work. This situation has been pointed out to the department many times - by myself, the IHWT, the USPCA and the SPCAs involved with horse welfare and rescue. The lack of regulation has been boiling under the surface for so long that it comes to no surprise to anyone involved in horse welfare or movement that there is horsemeat in the food chain. Horses are sold in Ireland for as little as 10 euro. Last year I loaded up a horse with an IHWT officer outside Bray that had been stabbed in the shoulder and was living on a piece of scrap land with no feed or water. It had been sold to a 10 year old child for 30 euro. Doubtless, its destiny was a lorry to Europe before we got hold of it.

An IHWT project on urban horse welfare in Limerick

What has been of little mention throughout this debate is the welfare issues involved here. Horses are put on lorries that are injured, about to foal or dying. Can you imagine the hellish journey these animals go through without food or water to be slaughtered in hellish conditions like those filmed by hidden cameras at the UK abattoir.

What the horsemeat scandal has revealed is there is overwhelming problems with the equine identification and movement system. Vets need to go back into ports, and the passport system enforced. Having a scheme in place is nonsense without enforcement.

These points were put to the Department of Agriculture's chief veterinary office Martin Blake on Primetime by broadcaster Claire Byrne and myself in a segment on the horsemeat issue. It seems there is little admission of the scale of the problem or how long it has been going on for. All I can hope is that recent events will speed up the will to look again at the tripartite agreement. Something radical needs to happen about the welfare and slaughter issues at the heart of this trade, let alone the dangers for us humans the consumers. You can view the segment at the link below.

http://www.rte.ie/news/player/prime-time/2013/0218/

Irish food culture is a game of two halves, where those at the bottom will suffer the most

Irish horses destined for the food chain

As the horsemeat scandal widens to include giant food labels like Nestle and the worlds biggest beef processor JBS, again we see food fraud not happening at farm level but at secondary processing level and the trade of "beef" in a snakes and ladders game encompassing a global set of players.

In short, the DNA tests carried out in Ireland by the FSAI opened a Pandora's Box of food chain nightmares. As the crisis sucks in more countries, it may seem like vindication for the Irish beef sector but is of little value to us consumers, especially those who shop at the lower end of food budgets, relying on processed foods and ready meals as family staples.


What the horsemeat scandal reveals is that Ireland's food culture is a tale of two halves. At one end of the scale, 'Artisan' meats like Aberdeen Angus Rib Eye and wild Irish game star on restaurant menus. Irish food has never been more vogueish. It is gushed over, photographed and blogged about on the 400-plus food blogs dedicated to Irish food alone.

Boning hall at a processor

On the other side of the Irish eating experience are the €1 fast food hamburger. The rashers that are retailing this week at €1 a pack. The Tesco Everyday Value burgers that sold for €1.41 (17 cent for a burger) until the FSAI revealed that at least one of them contained as much as 29pc equine DNA.

As family income crashed in recent years, so did our grocery spend. While foodies shopped at classy delicatessens, award-winning butchers and farm gates, on the poor side of town, consumers flocked to the discounters and got their grocery spend down from €200 a week to €60.

In a depressed marketplace, the Irish supermarkets engaged each other in aggressive price wars. Since 2005, food prices in the UK have increased by as much as 35pc. By comparison, prices in Ireland rose by only 3 to 4pc, despite the fact that prices in the euro area as a whole increased by 15pc. Consumers benefited and we trusted the food chain not to let us down. That trust was not to prove well-founded.

The FSAI's initial DNA tests were conducted on 'value' frozen burgers and supermarkets' own-brand ready meals. Did they know something that we didn't?

What became evident was that the system broke down, not on Irish farms but at the secondary processing phase – where meat is ground for burgers, and mixed with beef trim, fillers and a wide range of ingredients for ready meals.

Silvercrest Foods had a chain of at least three different suppliers involved in providing one single ingredient for the product. Exactly how many suppliers are involved in the production of one burger?

Is the price point simply too low to supply safe food? If not, is somebody creaming off the fat and who exactly are they?

Irish farmers get between 30pc and 40pc of the retail price of primary cuts of meat. They claim that there are three big operators in beef in Ireland – ABP, Kepak and Dawn Meats pay roughly the same prices for cattle despite allegedly being in competition.

Map of Europe's horsemeat trail

In late 2012, just as the price of beef in Ireland was hitting a healthy €4 a kilo, it suddenly tailed off despite low supplies in the UK. This gave a 50 cent per kilo advantage on animals killed there. As our biggest export market is the UK, why were factories here paying around two hundred euro less on finished animals?

The lid needs to be lifted on the precise relationship between beef processors and supermarkets. Ironically, just as the horse-burger story broke, the UK government, on the recommendation of the Competition Commission, appointed their grocery ombudsman to monitor the behaviour of supermarkets.

Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney said this week that similar Irish legislation is expected this term. The same promise was made at an Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture four years ago, where I gave evidence on the need to bring in a body to police the unfair balance of power in the system. It wasn't news then, like it isn't now.

It is worrying that what began with cheap food has made its way up the ladder. Horse DNA was found in burgers made by ABP at Silvercrest/ABP for the Co-Operative supermarket in the UK, known for its attention to provenance. Does risky sourcing become a money-making trick as we move further up the chain?

The majority of Irish consumers are caught at the cheap end of the grocery business. It's urgently clear that consumers need protection in the form of a supermarkets' ombudsman. If this is not the time to introduce one, then when is?