Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
The meal, withdrawn from sale on Tuesday, came from the French factory producing Findus beef lasagne, also at the centre of a row over horsemeat. Meanwhile, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has told MPs of plans to test all processed beef in the UK. Romania has rejected claims that it was responsible for wrongly describing horsemeat from its abattoirs as beef. Tesco took the frozen bolognese off the shelves when it found out Findus was concerned about the source of its meat processed by Comigel, based at Metz, north-eastern France.
The bolognese was removed from shelves last week
It is one of several products that have been withdrawn from UK shelves amid the current scandal over horsemeat in food products in the UK and Europe. Tesco Group technical director Tim Smith said: "The frozen Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese should contain only Irish beef from our approved suppliers. The source of the horsemeat is still under investigation by the relevant authorities. "The level of contamination suggests that Comigel was not following the appropriate production process for our Tesco product and we will not take food from their facility again. "We are very sorry that we have let customers down."
Testing time
Mr Paterson told MPs he had called in representatives of all Britain's producers, retailers and distributors and "made it clear" he expected to see immediate testing of all processed beef products across the supply chain. He said testing should take place every three months, and the Food Standards Agency should be notified of results. He told representatives from the British Retail Consortium, the Food and Drink Federation, the British Meat Processors Association, the Federation of Wholesale Distributors, the Institute of Grocery Distribution and individual retailers that he expected to see:
MORE
A maze of trading between meat wholesalers has made it increasingly difficult to trace the origins of food - enabling cheaper horsemeat disguised as beef to be sold in frozen meals across Europe. Finger-pointing in the scandal has grown by the day, involving more countries and more companies. France says that Romanian butchers and Dutch and Cypriot traders were part of a supply chain that resulted in horsemeat being labeled as beef before it was included in frozen dinners including lasagna, moussaka and the French equivalent of Shepherd's Pie. The affair started earlier this year with worries about horsemeat in burgers in Ireland and Britain.
Horsemeat is largely taboo in Britain and some other countries, though in France it is sold in specialty butcher shops and is prized by some connoisseurs. Authorities aren't worried about health effects, but it has unsettled consumers across Europe and raised questions about producers misleading the public. France's agricultural minister said Monday that regulators must find a way "out of the fog." One of the slaughterhouses implicated, Carmolimp, said in a statement its meat was properly labeled as horsemeat, adding that it had not exported beef in 2012. It called attempts to blame it for the scandal `'shameful," suggesting that only an incompetent French meat processor would mistake the horsemeat for beef.
Romania has some 25 horsemeat slaughterhouses and exports horsemeat to Cyprus, France, Poland and the Netherlands, often through middlemen, officials said. In deeply rural Romania, horses are sold from individual households to abattoirs, and each animal has four sets of documents before its meat is exported. Romanian authorities stopped short of confirming that the two slaughterhouses were the source of the horsemeat. But they said they checked paperwork that shows they were not improperly mislabeling meat before it was shipped out of the country to middlemen.
Prime Minister Victor Ponta said Monday there were no direct contracts between the Romanian plants and French companies and that the meat would have been mislabeled somewhere else along the line. "We can now ask that the guilty parties are sanctioned as fast and firmly as possible," he said. "I want to help catch and punish the guilty ones... .. We are victims of this fraud."
MORE
The Food Standards Agency says eight out of 206 horses it checked tested positive for bute, an equine painkiller and anti-inflammatory. It said of those eight, six - all slaughtered by a firm in southwest England - were sent to France and "may have entered the food chain."
The agency is working with French authorities to trace the meat. Earlier Thursday, Environment Minister David Heath told the House of Commons three horses might have entered the food chain. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.
Horsemeat itself is not dangerous to eat. But bute, or phenylbutazone, is considered harmful to human health.
Source
Horsemeat has been detected in frozen lasagne on sale in Germany and supermarkets have started removing the product from their shelves. The Real supermarket chain said it had withdrawn TiP frozen lasagne - the latest tainted processed food to figure in a Europe-wide scandal. Other German retailers including Tengelmann and Rewe are now checking their processed beef products too. The EU is urging member states to conduct random tests for horsemeat. All members should carry out DNA tests on processed beef for traces of horsemeat for three months from 1 March, the EU health commissioner said on Wednesday.
German authorities suspect a batch of lasagne sent from Luxembourg to a retailer in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. On Wednesday the state's Consumer Affairs Minister, Johannes Remmel, said that "after analysing the data we have learned that through a middleman in Luxembourg, a significant amount of goods has been shipped to Germany and North Rhine-Westphalia, and those goods are suspected, and I repeat only suspected, to have not been properly labelled". The shipment is believed to have taken place between November 2012 and January 2013.
Comigel connection
Mr Remmel said frozen processed foods had arrived in Germany, via Luxembourg, from Comigel - the supplier in northeastern France which sent mince containing horsemeat to several UK retailers. The supermarket giant Tesco, frozen food firm Findus and budget chain Aldi received mince containing horsemeat from Comigel. The French firm denied wrongdoing, saying it had ordered the meat from Spanghero, a firm in southern France, via a Comigel subsidiary in Luxembourg - Tavola. The supply chain reportedly led back to traders in Cyprus and the Netherlands, then to abattoirs in Romania. On Wednesday the EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg said EU states should test not only for horsemeat but also for the presence of the veterinary medicine phenylbutazone ("bute"), thought to be potentially harmful to humans. Mr Borg was speaking after a meeting with ministers from the UK, France and other affected countries in Brussels.
He said the programme of random tests should report after 30 days, but testing should continue for three months. The scandal has raised questions about the complexity of the food industry's supply chains across the EU. There are now calls for more specific labelling on processed meat products in the EU, to show country of origin, as in the case of fresh meat. But the cost of doing that may trigger opposition from food manufacturers. Romania has denied claims that it was to blame for the mislabelling. Germany's Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner called the mislabelling situation "a mess" and said the EU must put an effective food surveillance system in place to detect fraud. Speaking on German ARD television, she stressed that it was a problem of fraudulent labelling, not public health.
BBC News - Horsemeat scandal: Germany pulls lasagne off shelves
I imagine we've all eaten horse meat at some point, without being aware of it
I don't really understand why people are so happy to eat certain animals but then get morally outraged at the idea of eating others. Why does a horse/cat/dog have more rights than a cow/pig/sheep?
I try not to eat animals that I've kept as pets.
It's a quirk of mine
And after owning and riding horses, for years, I would probably choose starvation before eating one.
Britain's food regulator, meanwhile, said six horse carcasses that tested positive for an equine painkiller may have entered the human food chain in France and that horsemeat tainted with the medicine may have been sold to consumers "for some time." In Paris, Benoit Hamon, the economic and consumer affairs minister, said it appeared that the fraudulent sales had been going on for several months, and reached across 13 countries and 28 companies. He said there was plenty of blame to go around, but most of it rested with Spanghero, a wholesaler he said was well aware that the cheap meat was mislabeled when it sold it to Comigel, the frozen food processor. "Spanghero knew," Hamon said. "One thing that should have attracted Spanghero's attention? The price."
Hamon said the mislabeled meat from Romania was far below the market rate for beef. Spanghero was to be suspended immediately and the results of the investigation have been forwarded to prosecutors, officials said. A representative for Spanghero did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment. In a statement earlier this week, Spanghero said it does not buy, sell or process horsemeat. The company said it was cooperating with the investigation and would sue whoever was responsible for the fraud. Comigel itself was not blameless, Hamon said. The paperwork had significant irregularities, including failure to specify country of origin. "And once the meat was defrosted, we can ask ourselves why Comigel didn't notice that the color and odor was not that of beef," Hamon said.
Britain's Food Standards Agency said eight out of 206 horses it checked had tested positive for phenylbutazone, commonly known as bute. It said of those eight, six - all slaughtered by a firm in southwest England - were sent to France and "may have entered the food chain." The agency said it was working with French officials to trace the meat. Thousands of meat products are being tested for the drug, and for horse DNA, after horsemeat was found in food products labeled as beef across Europe. Pan-European police agency Europol is coordinating a continent-wide fraud investigation amid allegations of an international criminal conspiracy to substitute horse for more expensive beef.
Almost no horsemeat is consumed in Britain, where hippophagy - eating horses - is widely considered taboo. But thousands of horses killed in the country each year are exported for meat to countries including France and Belgium, which have a culture of eating horsemeat. The scandal has uncovered the labyrinthine workings of the global food industry, where meat from a Romanian slaughterhouse can end up in British lasagna by way of companies in Luxembourg and France. It has also raised the uncomfortable idea that Europeans may unwittingly have been consuming racehorses, which are often treated with bute.
MORE
Police in Wales said Thursday's arrests on suspicion of fraud offenses occurred at two plants that were inspected earlier this week by the U.K.'s Food Standards Agency.
Police said two men - ages 64 and 42 - were arrested Farmbox Meats near Aberystwyth, in Wales, while a 63-year-old man was arrested at the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
The arrests come after Britain's food regulator said six horse carcasses that tested positive for an equine painkiller may have entered the human food chain in France and that horsemeat tainted with the medicine may have been sold to consumers "for some time."
Source
Some in Western Europe have pointed the finger particularly at Romania, where a ban on horses in cities and the tough economic climate have been cited as reasons for a rise in exports of horse meat. The Romanians have insisted the meat was properly labeled as horse when it left the country, Reuters reported.
