The Elephant in the Room..........

[Maykal]

Have the supermarkets followed this change or led it?

I'd say they have probably 'encouraged' it. Ready/frozen meals have a longer shelf life than fresh ingredients and therefore it's in the supermarket's interest to encourage us to choose more of these types of products. So while they'll happily cater for both those who wish to do no more than sling something in the microwave and those who wish to prepare their own food, it seems reasonably obvious that they would wish to push the products and the associated lifestyle that generates the greater profits for them. They're a business after all and they'll use all their marketing strategies to sell us the products that make them more successful as a business.

[Green Aura]

http://themakingprogressblues.wordpress ... our-fault/

While I don't agree with all of it, it seems to sum up many of my thoughts on the subject.

[oldjerry]

Well, yes,but speaking as one who once farmed,it's a bit of a whitewash.........it basically accuses joe public of doing what farmers have been doing themselves since time was,i.e. cutting costs .
Also, only a farmer would suggest that non-supermarket stuff is affordable to practically everyone,maybe he should ask himself how many people his farm supported even 20 years ago
The small abbattoirs that were the mainstay of 'local meat ' in my experience got sod all support from large scale meat producers who would deal with large retailers directly,and their livestock would be carried long distances to large establishments.
The big clue is the link to the CA....those well known supporters of the rural population.........

[okra]

I was surprised that cheap burgers contained proper meat and thought it was mechanically recovered stuff. Just a thought would you rather eat horsemeat or mechanically recovered and chemically treated meat. Perhaps supermarkets, if it is cheaper. start a line in horse burgers.

[Green Aura]

I like this one even better
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... rty-crisis

[GeorgeSalt]

I was surprised that cheap burgers contained proper meat and thought it was mechanically recovered stuff. Just a thought would you rather eat horsemeat or mechanically recovered and chemically treated meat. Perhaps supermarkets, if it is cheaper. start a line in horse burgers.

This has been implicated in the problem. The EU banned desinewed meat (DSM) from cattle, sheep and goats. When produced from poultry and pigs it's classified as mechanically recovered meat (MRM) and can't count as "meat" whan calculating the percentages.

Once you take out a staple of the super-cheap economy processed food ingredient list, it's going to have to be replaced with something else. Fillet steak was never an option.

Then you get Eastern Europe deciding it wants to join the Western industrialised lifestyle and starting to push horse-drawn traffic off the road in favour of the internal combustion age.

The West needs another source of cheap meat from whole cuts that it can legally call meat on the ingredients, and the East has a large amount of surplus horseflesh.

Some shady guys in the middle start to make a lot of money tippexing out "Dobbin" and "Shergar" on the paperwork and writing "Daisy", "Cloverleaf" and "Ermintrude" in their place. Noone complains, and possibly doesn't look to closely - because the alternative is that the economy burgers will have to go from £1 to £2 per pack overnight, unless there's a cheap source of meat to keep the costs down.

[oldjerry]

I like this one even better
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... rty-crisis

Me too.

[okra]

I like this one even better
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... rty-crisis

Me too.

An excellent article and so very true