Never accept meat from strangers

Never accept meat from strangers. That seems to be the lesson of the horsemeat scandal – at least for the ex-commercial director of Freeza Meats. In September 2012, an Environment Health Officer arrived to inspect their meat stores. Discovering a large block of meat in one of their freezers, the officer decided to quarantine it. When the meat was tested for equine DNA, the meat was discovered to be 80% horse.

And thus the mysterious case of the frozen horsemeat began. James Fairbairn, the commercial director at the time, appeared in front of the Efra select committee yesterday in a bid to explain things. In August, so his story goes, a meat trader named Martin McAdam, who owned McAdam Foods, tried to sell Freeza a ‘consignment of beef’, which they declined. But, as McAdam had no cold store, they agreed to store it for him on ‘a temporary basis’ over the weekend, at no charge as a ‘goodwill gesture’.