a report on horse meat scandal

Essay by somilk12 September 2014

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A Report of Horsemeat Scandal

Introduction

While European people have long been proud of their food safety and authority, the happening of horsemeat scandal in 2013 hit them hard. With equine DNA found in beef burgers and similar processed food, the trust of people towards supermarket and other major food stores plummet to an all-time low. Why is and how can this happening? This report intends to give a fuller picture of the event, to probe deeper into the causes and to propose several highly possible and feasible solutions to prevent incidents of the kind from happening again. In the end of the essay, key points will be summarized in the conclusion paragraph.

The horsemeat scandal

In January 2013, a test commissioned by the FDA discovered traces of equine DNA in frozen beef burgers in Ireland unveiled the tip of the horsemeat scandal (Claire Suddath, 2014). Further inspection found that products labeled beef as the major ingredient contained considerable percentage of horsemeat and had been supplied to major supermarkets like Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland and Dunnes Stores by Silvercrest Foods in Ireland and Dalepak Hambleton in Yorkshire, subsidiaries of the ABP Food Group(Press association, 2014).

The process involved "horse meat from a Romanian abattoir being sold to a French supplier by way of a Cypriot trader, and then passed on to a French food processing company before landing on British and French supermarket shelves". Millions of burgers and lasagna are removed from the shelves; consumers were in shock and anger; institutes examined food samples for non-stop; authorities and police were busy tracking down the sources of contaminated horsemeat. Months of national and supranational investigation revealed that the horsemeat scandal had been going on for a long while, and that the causes and impact of the case are complicated and interconnected.