Horsemeat

[pretender]

Arn't you glad on this occassion you are a Coeliac, No Findus Lasagne and now Tesco Bolognese. For once we win.

[HiveMind]

Whooo Hooo!

[pretender]

As these dishes are made using mince I would use caution when buying mince.

[boo16]

Unless you have perhaps bought 'pure' meat 'beef' burgers! LOL x

[weee]

So pleased..:).. IMind you I have never been a fan of processed ready meals, even before my diagnosis .. But still, I'll grab the pleasure where I can

woop woop

[Sonianin]

I think the whole saga has just proven that a lot of what we buy should be questioned! And some poor buggers probably did get caught out, if this article is anything to go by:

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-o...

I read this at work (I work in Oxford!) and was pretty horrified, I seem to be more and more picky about what I buy these days and I don't have CD. I was gonna blog about a few companies I've come across that I really like, I'll go and do that now actually

[barny]

yea i sure am used to buy them befor i was diagnosed too make all my own now and make sure buy meat from buchers not supermarket x

[Huggy]

Unfortunately there's no guarantee that GF ready meals that have mince in them do not contain horse meat. When I don't have the time to make a lasagne, I buy the Sainsbury's frozen one and I think is very nice. I have one in the freezer at the moment but I'm a bit reluctant to eat it!

[saltyswamp]

I haven't bought ready meals for at least 10yrs, when making spag bol etc always make more than needed and freeze the rest in portion sizes. Not forgeting to get your meat from a butcher who knows where his meat comes from.

[philaustin]

The point about the Horsegate scandal is that the content of food products is not being checked.

Some foods """do not""" contain what it says they contain in the ingredients label.

So if beef can get replaced by horsemeat without anyone noticing (apparently ha ha) how do we know we're not buying food that is contaminated with gluten?

The message I get from Horsegate is that you can't believe labels anymore.

I'm just waiting for some entrepreneur to cash in on all of this by setting up a food testing company, only to be found to be not testing it properly in a few years time, having made a mint out of it meanwhile....

[philaustin]

I forgot to add, and this is not coeliac related, that the poorest people buy more processed food than anyone else because its all they can afford, so it seems a bit "I'm allright Jack" for anyone to say that they only buy the best cuts of meat from their local butcher.

Few people have local butchers since Tesco put them out of business.

[pretender]

And when you complain about a food product what happens? a reply that they do not know how it slipped through quality control blah blah blah.

How long has it been going on for before it was detected?

[Jacks]

The whole horsemeat saga has made me also question what's not being said about the food offered to anyone, including coeliacs, so I definitely don't feel safe (tho I don't buy the ready-made GF meals). You only have to look at the 'Deletions' on the CUK electronic directory pages. If you are a hungry coeliac then food doesn't hang around long .... and to read that something contained wheat (when labelled otherwise) makes me furious.

The horrifying thing about horse getting into the food chain is not it's resemblance to Black Beauty but the fact that horses are given carcinogenic drugs for rheumatic ailments, sprains etc, so working horses are likely to have been given large quantities of the drug in their lifetime - and this is all happening as horses are being banned off the roads in a certain country where the horsemeat scandal started. They are drugs that were banned from human ingestion. If dogs are prescribed these drugs, even in the short term, they need to have monthly blood tests.

[pretender]

Speaking only for myself, my diet is devoid of any gluten or wheat derivatives, I do not belong to Coeliac UK or believe in their bible, they do not represent me. I have learn't to find out what ingredients there are in foods and what their origin was. Having been twice diagnosed with a 45 year gap I also found that the gluten free diet made me ill, the gluten/wheat free diet made me ill, some medications made me ill, the reason being that some ingredients made formaldehyde in the gut which made me ill.

There is now concern about putting the ingredients countries origin on products where it would be far simpler to put "horse" "beef" Wheat" instead of all those fancy names.