Just 9 months after the horsemeat scandal revealed that products labelled as beef did, in fact, contain horsemeat, one might have expected the food standards authority to have cracked down on food labelling – particularly when it comes to meat.
But in an investigation broadcast earlier this week by the BBC’s Farming Today programme, a reporter bought a pork chop ‘at random’ from Tesco. It was labelled with the ‘Red Tractor’ logo, which ought to mean that it ‘is fully traceable back to independently inspected farms in the UK’. However, lab tests showed that the meat probably came from a Dutch farm – in fact there’s less than a 1% chance that the meat came from a British farm.
This, however, is quite a different situation from the horsemeat one. In that case, it was low quality, frozen meat products that had been ‘tainted’ with cheaper meat in a bid to reduce the price, and cost to the producer, as much as possible.
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