The whole scandal in England about horse meat being found in various burger patties and mincemeat products has now come to South Africa. The testing of mincemeat, processed cold meats and burger patties has revealed the presence of all sorts of other animals, including donkeys. I have written before about food safety and labelling, and it is really the same issue again.

There may well be people who are quite happy to eat the products that they are illegally putting into what is meant to be beef only, but they should at least have the choice of knowing what is in the product. It seems that big business knows no limits when it comes to making a profit – if it is cheaper to buy horses than to raise cows, then they will happily sell you horsemeat and pretend that it is the same thing. There are many, who in terms of their religion, are not allowed to eat certain types of meats and so the scandal has a religious angle to it as well. It appears that one of the big problems both here and abroad, is that there are simply not enough food inspectors to go around to the various factories and shops to inspect that what they are selling is indeed the real product, and so we have, even in highly regulated societies like Germany, hens sitting in cages and their eggs being labelled as free range organic eggs.

There needs to be a lot more policing in terms of health inspectors around the world, and those who want a better product are going to ultimately have to pay for it. If it is important to you, you will also have to shop carefully, using a store that has a reputation for checking its suppliers and perhaps paying a little bit more at the checkout point.
Recent DNA testing of various fish sold in restaurants and shops has indicated that in many cases the fish we are sold are not what we paid for! For example, tuna sold as yellowfin tuna is often in fact a much cheaper version of tuna called skipjack. An endangered fish called the river snapper, which is illegal to sell or buy, is sometimes sold in South Africa as “red snapper”.