Horsemeat

Mark Spencer Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

Exactly. I raised that very issue with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs yesterday, and I have to say from his response that it looked as if it was the first he had heard of it; he simply said that we rely on scientific advice, which I think is scandalous.

I am just halfway through my description of the process involved in producing pink slime. The recovered beef material is then processed, heated and treated with gaseous ammonia or citric acid to kill bacteria. It is then finely ground, compressed into pellets, flash frozen and shipped for use as an additive. There was a public outcry over this issue a while ago, and we saw Jamie Oliver appearing on American TV decrying its use. There was a real backlash, and companies such as McDonalds, Burger King and Taco Bell announced that they would discontinue its use. There was also an outcry about it appearing in meals in the public sector, and promises were made that that would no longer happen. Once consumers knew that there was pink slime in their food, they did not want it and wanted the meat industry to stop producing it.

There is also a substance that has become colloquially known as “white slime” in meat products. It is officially known as “mechanically separated meat” or “mechanically recovered meat”. This is the product most likely to be used in highly processed meat products such as burgers or pies. It is a paste-like product produced by forcing beef, pork, turkey or chicken under high pressure through a sieve to get every last little scrap of meat off the bone. Questions have been raised about its safety and some have argued there should be limits on how much of it should be used in a food product—for example, no more than 20% is allowed in hot dogs. The fact is, however, that consumers do not realise that this is in their hot dogs. Finally, there is advanced meat recovery, which separates meat from bone by scraping, shaving or pressing the meat from the bone—again, typically used in hot dogs.

Let me quote what John Harris said in an excellent article in yesterday’s The Guardian—it may sound a bit of a cliché to keep quoting this newspaper, but it is not particularly fond of vegetarians generally. He said that EU regulations insist that if a product is to be called “meat”, it has to be

“skeletal muscle with naturally included or adherent fat and connective tissue”.

He said that our Food Standards Agency insists that economy beefburgers must contain at least 40% of this product, which must come from cows. That is not very reassuring; I think people expect their beefburgers to have beef in them, not cartilage, fat and connective tissue.

In talking about the relentless search for profits from cheap food, John Harris cited a Financial Times article saying that Findus products came from a factory in Luxembourg, which was supplied with meat by a company in south-west France, which had acquired frozen meat from a Cypriot trader that had subcontracted the order to a trader in the Netherlands—who was then supplied from an abattoir and butcher located in Romania. As John Harris says, how messed up has our food system become? All this is a far cry from the sort of meat that many Members praised during yesterday’s statement on horsemeat. The advisability of buying local meat from a local farm sold by a local butcher was highlighted, where the path from the pasture to the plate is a matter of public record. Indeed, I have heard people saying that they take local sourcing so far that they even know the name of the cow they are consuming.

It is very easy to say that, and in ideal world, people would be looking to buy organically reared locally produced products, but that is very expensive. Yes, it can be said that people should try to cook their own food and source it locally instead of buying ready-made meals, but I am sure many MPs grab a ready meal from Tesco or Marks and Spencer on their way home after a vote. We should not be too judgmental about people who turn to value ranges and ready-made meals, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) said. If someone has only a couple of pounds left in their purse and there is a £1 lasagne ready meal or an eight-pack of Tesco economy burgers left in the shop, they will buy one of those rather than buying the mince, the sheets of pasta, the flour, the butter, the tomatoes, the herbs and the cheese that they would need to make lasagne from scratch. Many people do not even have the necessary cooking facilities in any case. I have seen single men in my constituency living in bedsits with just a microwave for cooking.

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

This should not seem like rocket science to the hon. Lady. If I told her that I could flog her a cheap telly, she would think to herself, “There must be something wrong with that TV.” It does not strike me as much of an extension of that argument to suggest that if those processed meat products are so much cheaper than other products, their quality will not be the same.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Sometimes people simply do not have a choice between buying the slightly dodgy knock-off cheap telly that has probably come off the back of a lorry and going to one of the high street shops and buying a top-of-a-range brand. That is the point that I am trying to make. People may well know that what they are eating is not as good as the organic produce that is sold in, for instance, The Better Food Company, an organic supermarket in Bristol, but they do not have the option of going there. As I have said, even if people had enough money to buy more than one day’s food and could plan ahead and try to cook their own meals, they would still not be buying premium “best of British” mince. They would be buying the sort of mince that was mentioned just now by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), and about which I asked the Secretary of State yesterday. If the Government manage to find their way around European Union regulations, that mince could be up to 50% fat and collagen, and other substances that are not meat, without the consumer’s being any the wiser.

We need to get the message across to Government Members. We are living in a world in which people’s cost of living is being squeezed from all sides. Their incomes and benefits are being cut, their rents are going up, and fuel prices, fares and food prices are rising. Obviously they will buy the packet of eight Tesco value burgers for £1, because they have no other option. According to statistics released last week by Mintel, the market research company, some 30% of consumers now buy budget ranges, as opposed to just one in five back in 2008. We cannot insist that everyone should buy the premium, locally sourced, top-of-the-range products, because some people simply cannot afford to do that. The important point, surely, is that all food should be of a decent quality, and all consumers should know what is in their food.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner). Although he represents an urban constituency, he speaks with great knowledge and experience about the food industry, and has a reputation for doing so. May I also draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?

This topic has not suddenly emerged over the past two and half years; the problem we are talking about today has been a long time coming, and therefore some of the comments from Opposition Members stick in my throat like a dodgy burger. They speak as if this Government have created this problem, but the entire situation has been changing since the second world war, when the proportion of cash an individual spent on their food bill was much larger than it is today. Then, families would have spent 60% of their income on food, but today that figure is much smaller and as such we have lost the context of how valuable our food is.

I drew an analogy with television, but we could say the same about car tyres. A person would never buy second-hand car tyres from someone offering them on the cheap, because they would instantly recognise that their individual safety could be at risk. However, we as consumers seem to have got into a position where we are happy to see the price of food fall and be driven down. We have lost the concept of how valuable our food is, and that has led us to the position we are in today.

The hon. Member for Brent North referred to the fact that the Education Secretary plans to reintroduce cooking and food to the curriculum, which is a great step forward. Two generations of consumer have lost contact with how food is produced and with how to cook raw product, and again, that is to the detriment of our food industry. If the Government can do anything, more education about how to cook food and deal with raw products will mean that consumers are able to buy better quality food for the same money if they learn to shop about and source food from the right places.

Today, UK agriculture finds itself in a different place from the rest of the world, but that is no fluke and comes from bitter experience. The BSE crisis in the UK taught the beef industry valuable lessons about consumer confidence and how the consumer needs to understand, know and have confidence in a product. Today we know that if we go to our local butcher, not only will they be able to sell us a very high-quality cut of meat or processed beefburger, but they will be able to identify the animal that the beefburger came from, as well as its mother and father. That is the level of traceability in the UK butchery industry today, and UK consumers should understand that. Certainly, when that is compared with some of the points made by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) about the processed meat industry, and with some of the products sold as meat that normal people would not recognise as such, there is a strong message to deliver on behalf of the UK meat industry.

This is not rocket science: the shorter we make the chain, the easier it is to have such traceability, and labelling will be important as we move forward. We heard from the Opposition about how the labelling of our products should be more prominent, yet when they were in power, there were several private Members’ Bills and lobbying by the then Opposition to try to improve labelling and ensure that consumers understood where and how their food was being produced.

[Simon Hart]

On that point, does my hon. Friend agree that in this instance there was nothing unclear about the labelling? It said beef but in fact it was horse.

[Mr Spencer]

Absolutely, and that is fundamental. Frankly, that could not happen in the UK because environmental health officers and trading standards officers are checking a paper trail that goes right back.

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman has said, but surely the issue is about criminality, which is international. If a criminal changes the label, it does not matter whether the meat is British or comes from abroad; consumers will not have confidence.

[Mr Spencer]

I acknowledge that position, but my point is that given the traceability in the UK industry, the opportunity to change those labels is simply not there. Registered vets in every abattoir in the United Kingdom are watching the line and checking that the carcases are stamped and marked. They cannot be changed. When one buys what is basically a block of frozen meat from an international buyer, it is easy to pull off the label that says “beef” and slap on one that says something else, or reverse that process. That is a sad state of affairs.

Consumers want to know exactly what they are eating, but today we are in a position where I could set up my own little factory, buy in Brazilian chicken, make chicken pies in my kitchen, and sell them as Nottinghamshire chicken pie. We need to look more closely at the labelling process so that the industry tells consumers exactly what they are buying and where it has come from.

In the end, the consumer has the power and can choose where they source their products. They can choose to go to a supermarket or to a local, small and independent high-street butcher. They can shop around and make those decisions. I acknowledge that that becomes challenging right at the bottom, where people are struggling to make ends meet and to find the cash to buy those products. That is why we need a regulatory system that they can have confidence in, that they can support and that they acknowledge.

My final message is that this weekend, when people are thinking about what they want to have for dinner, they should go to their local butcher, look him in the eye and say, “Where has this animal come from? Tell me about it.” People will then be able to eat that dinner with confidence, knowing that they are buying good-quality, locally produced meat.

[Neil Parish]

(Tiverton and Honiton) rose—