Horsemeat scandal – like every other scandal — turns into blame game

The story is dominating local news: illicit activity, selling something not as advertised, possible links with organized crime.

Footy in Australia is under intense scrutiny as government types realize, there may be a problem. Like cycling and the Tour de France.

Like horse meat substituting for other meat apparently throughout the EU.

Doug Powell, a Kansas State University food safety expert, told the Toronto Star“It isn’t really a food safety story at this point. It is food fraud. How could
gummer.hamburgersomeone not have known? Now you’ll get a lot of finger pointing.”

What I also said was that food fraud is centuries old, and that only now is technology available to provide data to support all kinds of food hucksterism.

I also mentioned that companies marketing stuff they don’t know about are the primary villains here; government and regulatory complacency is to be expected.

Ed Bedington, editor of Meat Trades Journal, told the BBC the Findus horse meat case has brought into question the security of supply chains.

“Retailers make great play about the audits they do and the robustness of the supply chain. But as a long-term observer of the sector, it calls all that into question.”

But rest assured Canadians, home of the Walkerton E. coli-in-water outbreak, 23 deaths from listeria-in-deli meats, and the 2003 downer-cattle-slaughtered-after-hours at Aylmer Meats: rapid DNA tests of 15 hamburgers by University of Guelph types has concluded they were all beef.