Having some nice rashers for breakfast

Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, December 7, 2008

So 47 farms used contaminated pig feed. Unless the FSAI confirms that Gubbeen or Caherbeg are two of those farms, I’ll be having a lovely bacon sarnie for my breakfast.

Gubbeen

If the State’s Chief Medical Officer says that dioxin is only dangerous if a person is exposed to it over a long period of time, then why the hell are we destroying millions of Euro worth of food?

We all eat chicken that spends its life sitting in its own faeces in the dark and lots of the pork we eat is dosed up to the eyeballs in sub-therapeutic antibiotics, so how is a slight possibility of a touch of PCB going to make our health any worse?

Related to this, I’ve met with a few small food producers recently and I don’t know how they stay in business with the nonsensical levels of paperwork and measurement that they have to deal with. Is this actually part of the problem? An unbelievably bloated bureaucracy unable to measure and react quickly because they are drowning in irrelevant form processing? A bit like Sarbanes-Oxley in the US causing people to be so obsessed with process, they forgot about the intent and allowed the banks to trade recklessly for years. 

Finally, I thought we had full meat traceability from field (or concrete pen) to fork? Why not just release the tracking codes of all the individual batches we need to destroy? Or are we all a bit too thick to manage that?

This Sunday’s rasher sandwich brought to you by the letter P and the Caherbeg Television Workshop:

07122008199


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