rearing to kill.......

Tora Bora

reilig wrote: »

I have. A neighbour died in 1984 from food poisoning from a bull calf that he slaughtered. He died from HPS (Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome). Google it.

So if someone came to your house for a meal, you wouldn't feed them the home slaughtered meat, you'd go out and buy traceable stuff?? :rolleyes:

There was a documantary on RTE or TV3 a few weeks ago, about processed meats. Likes of ham joints, ham as in sliced ham, etc, etc.

Must try to find it, and post a link if it is on RTE player etc!

I don't know if you or anybody on here saw it, BUT, if you did, you would really, really want to think about if you want to continue eating it, or feeding it to your children!!

I know, sliced ham for sandwiches since we saw that program, is a thing of the past.

Basically you are eating very appetising looking, and very tasty meat .......... BUT, it's essentially chemically induced look and taste!!

clonmahon

reilig wrote: »

I have. A neighbour died in 1984 from food poisoning from a bull calf that he slaughtered. He died from HPS (Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome). Google it.

So if someone came to your house for a meal, you wouldn't feed them the home slaughtered meat, you'd go out and buy traceable stuff?? :rolleyes:

Clarify this for me. According to Wikipedia "Humans may be infected with hantaviruses through rodent bites, urine, saliva or contact with rodent waste products". Did he contract this through eating the meat or handling it.

reilig

Tora Bora wrote: »

There was a documantary on RTE or TV3 a few weeks ago, about processed meats. Likes of ham joints, ham as in sliced ham, etc, etc.

Must try to find it, and post a link if it is on RTE player etc!

I don't know if you or anybody on here saw it, BUT, if you did, you would really, really want to think about if you want to continue eating it, or feeding it to your children!!

I know, sliced ham for sandwiches since we saw that program, is a thing of the past.

Basically you are eating very appetising looking, and very tasty meat .......... BUT, it's essentially chemically induced look and taste!!

I saw that. It would make you think twice about buying meat.
Luckily I never have to buy any meat. The local slaughterhouse will legally slaughter cattle, lambs or pigs for us. They will cure bacon, and chop and label all other meat ready for the freezer. For the prices charged, you could not afford to do it yourself, and it is all done legally. TBH, most farmers in our area will not buy meat from shops, but will instead have their own legally slaughtered!!

reilig

clonmahon wrote: »

Clarify this for me. According to Wikipedia "Humans may be infected with hantaviruses through rodent bites, urine, saliva or contact with rodent waste products". Did he contract this through eating the meat or handling it.

I don't honestly know!

Buy I can confirm that he died!

The post mortem carried out on him found traces of HPS on the meat in his stomach and this is what was given as cause of death.

Tora Bora

reilig wrote: »

I saw that. It would make you think twice about buying meat.
Luckily I never have to buy any meat. The local slaughterhouse will legally slaughter cattle, lambs or pigs for us. They will cure bacon, and chop and label all other meat ready for the freezer. For the prices charged, you could not afford to do it yourself, and it is all done legally. TBH, most farmers in our area will not buy meat from shops, but will instead have their own legally slaughtered!!

Well, I rest my case than. You and your neighbours, and all the rest of us, bust our bollox, to rear and feed animals to exacting and tracable standards. Nothing at all wrong with that. I am in favour.

Now, you will send a couple of animals for the freezer, for your own use to the local abbatoir to be slaughtered and packed etc,. Fine, no problem.

Now all the other meat you produce goes to the "system", and ends up on the supermarket shelves in all kinds of slices, and cuts, and so on.

After all your hard work, complying with standards, your perfectly natural healthy well produced meat, gets tumbeled around in a centrifuge for up to 22 hours, injected with water, injected with chemicals, tumbeled again in the centrifuge, injected again with more chemicals, packeged and landed on the housewifes table!!!
The meat on the table according to the documentary, is 20% injected water and chemicals, by weight!:mad::mad::mad:

Now, fcuk it, I see no sense whatsoever to this, total bullsh1t system!!

clonmahon

reilig wrote: »

Slaughterhouses just have to meet the same HACCP rules as a large scale meat plant. HACCP inspectors don't care if the kit used for slaughtering the animals is 100 years old or brand new - just as long as it is clean. Are you saying that just because a slaughter facility kills one animal per day, it shouldn't need to be as clean as a facility which kills 100 animals per day?

No I'm not saying it shouldn't be clean, I'm saying that a skilled artisan working alone has complete control of the process. This is different, very different to hundreds of unskilled workers on a production line. The risks are not the same, the conquences of a f**k up are not the same. The traceability issues are not the same. In France and Spain they recognize this and treat them differently. Here we do not, we apply exactly the same standards.

I can cook meals in my kitchen at home for my family and visitors and I have never poisoned anyone. I do not have stainless steel worktops, I do not have tiled walls and floors, I do not have two sinks, I do not have two fridges, I do not have soap dispensers. I have a very basic kitchen but I understand the risks involved in preparing food and manage the process accordingly. I could quite safely produce a small amount of food for sale in my primitive kitchen without risk to public health, but if I did the absence of the above mentioned facilities could cause a problem with the HSE. My point again is that once the enterprise is small and the amount of produce being produced is small, and the person knows what they are doing the risk is small, even if the facilities are primitive.

reilig wrote: »

Your example of the sponge cakes isn't a great one. You, as a buyer of sponge cakes at a car boot sale would expect that the cakes be produced in as clean an environment as a factory producing 3000 cakes per day. If you heard that someone got food poisoning after buying one of the cakes at the car boot sale last week, then you wouldn't be inclined to buy one there this week?

But here's the thing housewifes and school kids do produce small amounts of food in domestic kitchens and sell it at car boot sales and farmers markets all over the country. But I have never heard of anyone getting food poisoning from it. I have however heard of lots of cases of food poisoning in restaurants and we all know of cases of food poisoning that were caused by products made in factories.

Muckit

The italians and the spainish must be killing each other left right and centre with their Prosciutto and Iberico hams :rolleyes:

Out in Italy last year I walked into a BAR (sounds like a paddy irishman joke!) ..anyway... and they had ham hocks hanging up behind the bar.

Forget your salted nuts, you could have a few slices while enjoying your tipple, which I did. I'm still alive! This meat is uncooked, yes it's dry cured, but not a fridge in site!

clonmahon

Muckit wrote: »

The italians and the spainish must be killing each other left right and centre with their Prosciutto and Iberico hams :rolleyes:

Out in Italy last year I walked into a BAR (sounds like a paddy irishman joke!) ..anyway... and they had ham hocks hanging up behind the bar.

Forget your salted nuts, you could have a few slices while enjoying your tipple, which I did. I'm still alive! This meat is uncooked, yes it's dry cured, but not a fridge in site!

Thanks Muckit this is exactly my point, on the continent the authorities recognize the difference between small scale and industrial food production and treat them differently. Here they make the same demands of both.

I have a friend who is a ex-butcher and went on holidays in Spain, he was amazed at the way raw meat was sold outdoors in markets, on stalls, with not a fridge in sight, in a warm climate, if the HSE saw you doing that here they would shut you down. But as my friend said what's the problem the meat will be cooked.

BeeDI

Muckit wrote: »

The italians and the spainish must be killing each other left right and centre with their Prosciutto and Iberico hams :rolleyes:

Out in Italy last year I walked into a BAR (sounds like a paddy irishman joke!) ..anyway... and they had ham hocks hanging up behind the bar.

Forget your salted nuts, you could have a few slices while enjoying your tipple, which I did. I'm still alive! This meat is uncooked, yes it's dry cured, but not a fridge in site!

Exactly. Well said.
Walk down many of the side streets of Paris, and see the local food markets. Plenty of meats, of all kinds on open display. Nobody dying as a result. That's in a hot, dirty polluted city!!
Now if that were in Ireland, you would have a government employed busy body, reading the law, and if you were lucky giving you, a half an hour to close up shop!:( We have become, complete and utter door mats for Europe, for them to wipe their feet on. No other country applies these kinds of nonsense laws like we do.
Pity our regulators didn't police the rotten parts of the economy, like the banks, and the financial regulators office, and the central bank, and FAS, and a few more of the totally discredited organisations over here.
There is a lot of people paying a heavy price for the failure of these organisations, and none that I heard about suffering any consequence from eating a home killed broiler

reilig

Lads I agree with all of your sentiments and thoughts on home slaughter for your own use. Yet noone has suggested a way that we can still protect the traceability scheme that is already in place - a traceability scheme upon which all of our beef, pork and lamb exports are intrinsicly built on.

Its not Europe that have enforced all of these conditions on our meat production - it is ourselves. Because we have this traceability, other countries aren't afraid to import our meat. Countries like Spain, italy, france, egypt don't need this traceability system because they don't export meat. However, if our ability to trace meat from farm to fork disintegrates, countries like Spain, france, Italy and Egypt won't even look at out meat exports.

As I said above, traceability and the conditions that come with it are an inconvenience for those of us who want to eat our own animals. But if you are a farmer producing animals for meat then tghis traceability system and all the red tape and paperwork taht comes with it is your bread and butter!!

If we are allowed to home slaughter, what's to stop Muckit from killing a calf and selling it in quarters to his neighbours. Or what's to stop Tora Bora from home killing a pig and selling it out of the boot of his car at various markets.

While Muckit and Tora Bora would be very reliable people and ensure that the highest standards are met, what's to stop some Joe Soap dirty clotty fecker from raising 50 pigs on waste offal (cow stomachs etc) collected from the other various home slaughterers (It was happening in loads of places before pig herd numbers were brough it), killing them in his back yard, having no regard for hygiene or standards and selling the whole lot for cash out of the boot of his car for cash at various markets.

If only 1 person contracted Ecoli from this guy's meat, what would happen to the whole meat industry?

Would all home slaughterers be honest and god fearing people??

If not, would it need to be regulated?

Tora Bora

reilig wrote: »

Lads I agree with all of your sentiments and thoughts on home slaughter for your own use. Yet noone has suggested a way that we can still protect the traceability scheme that is already in place - a traceability scheme upon which all of our beef, pork and lamb exports are intrinsicly built on.

Its not Europe that have enforced all of these conditions on our meat production - it is ourselves. Because we have this traceability, other countries aren't afraid to import our meat. Countries like Spain, italy, france, egypt don't need this traceability system because they don't export meat. However, if our ability to trace meat from farm to fork disintegrates, countries like Spain, france, Italy and Egypt won't even look at out meat exports.

As I said above, traceability and the conditions that come with it are an inconvenience for those of us who want to eat our own animals. But if you are a farmer producing animals for meat then tghis traceability system and all the red tape and paperwork taht comes with it is your bread and butter!!

If we are allowed to home slaughter, what's to stop Muckit from killing a calf and selling it in quarters to his neighbours. Or what's to stop Tora Bora from home killing a pig and selling it out of the boot of his car at various markets.

While Muckit and Tora Bora would be very reliable people and ensure that the highest standards are met, what's to stop some Joe Soap dirty clotty fecker from raising 50 pigs on waste offal (cow stomachs etc) collected from the other various home slaughterers (It was happening in loads of places before pig herd numbers were brough it), killing them in his back yard, having no regard for hygiene or standards and selling the whole lot for cash out of the boot of his car for cash at various markets.

If only 1 person contracted Ecoli from this guy's meat, what would happen to the whole meat industry?

Would all home slaughterers be honest and god fearing people??

If not, would it need to be regulated?

But nobody on here is suggesting or supporting killing at home, and selling on in any shape or form.
All we are saying, is home butchering in the time honoured and proven way, should not be illegal. Now I know it's not really practical or ok, in any shape or form for a beef animal.
But a few wethers, and a pig or two, and a round of chickens, geese, ducks. Let the Tesco's, and Larry Goodmans of this world, go on their merry profiteering way, with the rest of the market.:cool:

If we let them, they will stop us from planting the haggard, in the traditional way, using last years cow dung as fertilizer for the spuds and so on. All for the common good they will say, but in fact it will be good only for box ticking officials, and all the other controlling interests in the food chain of today.

reilig

Tora Bora wrote: »

But nobody on here is suggesting or supporting killing at home, and selling on in any shape or form.
All we are saying, is home butchering in the time honoured and proven way, should not be illegal. Now I know it's not really practical or ok, in any shape or form for a beef animal.
But a few wethers, and a pig or two, and a round of chickens, geese, ducks. Let the Tesco's, and Larry Goodmans of this world, go on their merry profiteering way, with the rest of the market.:cool:

If we let them, they will stop us from planting the haggard, in the traditional way, using last years cow dung as fertilizer for the spuds and so on. All for the common good they will say, but in fact it will be good only for box ticking officials, and all the other controlling interests in the food chain of today.

Clonmahon, Muckit and Beedi are all supporting slaughtering at home for artizan sales - or maybe I took them up wrong.

I thought this was the question that I asked in the last post, but here it is in another way.

If you allow slaughter for home only, how do you stop people taking advantage of an unregulated system and using this system to slaughter meat to sell on the side such as a market, door to door sales or on the black market and how do you stop people who may take advantage of this scheme and process diseased meat or meat which has been contaminated by hormones??

Isn't the way to prevent this to have a traceable system such as the one currently in place or can you identify another system that would be less regulated than the existing system but work just as good?

BeeDI

reilig wrote: »

Tora Bora wrote: »

But nobody on here is suggesting or supporting killing at home, and selling on in any shape or form.
All we are saying, is home butchering in the time honoured and proven way, should not be illegal. Now I know it's not really practical or ok, in any shape or form for a beef animal.
But a few wethers, and a pig or two, and a round of chickens, geese, ducks. Let the Tesco's, and Larry Goodmans of this world, go on their merry profiteering way, with the rest of the market.:cool:

If we let them, they will stop us from planting the haggard, in the traditional way, using last years cow dung as fertilizer for the spuds and so on. All for the common good they will say, but in fact it will be good only for box ticking officials, and all the other controlling interests in the food chain of today.

Clonmahon, Muckit and Beedi are all supporting slaughtering at home for artizan sales - or maybe I took them up wrong.

I thought this was the question that I asked in the last post, but here it is in another way.

If you allow slaughter for home only, how do you stop people taking advantage of an unregulated system and using this system to slaughter meat to sell on the side such as a market, door to door sales or on the black market and how do you stop people who may take advantage of this scheme and process diseased meat or meat which has been contaminated by hormones??

Isn't the way to prevent this to have a traceable system such as the one currently in place or can you identify another system that would be less regulated than the existing system but work just as good?

The regulated system we have, takes perfectly good healthy meat, and processes it, to give it longer shelf life, and better appearance etc. And it miraculously gains weight in the process compliments of added water and nitrates.
I don't know Muckit or the others from Adam, but I'd be fairly confident, that a handful of chops I'd get from them would be a whole lot better than the shop stuff, regulation or no regulation.
You haven't addressed the issue of, regulating the home butchering of game or fowl or fish.
If it ain't right to butcher a lamb, surely it ain't right to kill a trout or a salmon from the local river.
Imagine the uproar there would be if the suits got as far as that with their self serving regulations.

Muckit

Did anyone read the editors page in yesterday's IFJ ?

One frustrated (and rightly so IMO) wrote in to tell of his story. A weanling bull had a mishap, which can happen, and broke his leg.

Off to the factory, but 'no' says the vet, can't tak him.

So straight to his butcher goes the farmer thinking he'I at least have meat for the house.

Same vet checks out animal and again says 'no'.

The animal had to be put down and disposed of. Now not alone is the farmer down the price of his animal, but he has the added cost of disposing of him.

Now I think this is just shameful.

It's a situation that could befall any of us, and this is the solution?? :mad:

clonmahon

reilig wrote: »

If you allow slaughter for home only, how do you stop people taking advantage of an unregulated system and using this system to slaughter meat to sell on the side such as a market, door to door sales or on the black market and how do you stop people who may take advantage of this scheme and process diseased meat or meat which has been contaminated by hormones??

Isn't the way to prevent this to have a traceable system such as the one currently in place or can you identify another system that would be less regulated than the existing system but work just as good?

I appreciate your fears reilig, that Irish farming is having a good run right now after so many hard years and you are afraid that just one major food scare and it all goes to hell again. No one wants that.

I think we need to learn from France, Spain and Italy all of whom have thriving artisan food sectors. I don't know exactly how the regulations work there, but they are much more relaxed for the artisan food sector than they are for industrial food sector. They recognize that the scale of the risk is different and regulate accordingly. We should just adopt their system and implement it here. The problem is that we will not.

fodda

The whole point of this is because of what? Can you please clarify?

Is it that you object to paying slaughterman/butcher charges to kill your home reared? These are skilled tradesmen with qualifications and/or years of experience, why would you object to paying for their services?

You want to try and undercut legitimate businesses who have gone to the expense and complied with all the regulations you object too?

Exactly why do you want to kill your own home reared when you have no experience or are willing to be trained or to comply with any regulations ?

clonmahon

fodda wrote: »

The whole point of this is because of what? Can you please clarify?

You are not quoting anything, what exactly are you seeking clarity on. We are nearly at post number 50 on this thread.

fodda wrote: »

Is it that you object to paying slaughterman/butcher charges to kill your home reared? These are skilled tradesmen with qualifications and/or years of experience, why would you object to paying for their services?

You want to try and undercut legitimate businesses who have gone to the expense and complied with all the regulations you object too?

Exactly why do you want to kill your own home reared when you have no experience or are willing to be trained or to comply with any regulations ?

You are making a whole series of assumptions here, without any knowledge. You have no idea what so ever of what my experience or qualifications are.

I have two points
1. If people wish to rear and kill livestock for home consumption, they will. Don't matter what the regulations are people are doing this up long lanes.

2. Applying the same regulations to artisan food producers as apply to industrial scale production is witless and idiotic.

Dusty87

All i know is my grandmother killed, cured and butchered home reared pigs and goats, with no qualifications. Her 7 children are fine healthy adults now, and id have no problem having a rasher or two from her back then. And were not talking years ago. She done her last pig 'Friday', 22 years ago.
Fodda, as a hunter, do you send your pheasants, deer, whatever you hunt to a 'professional'??
Im in no way knocking butchers, one recently did my pigs for me, but if someone is confident and able in doing it for home consumption, then why not??

fodda

It is quite simple Dusty as others have also explained.

This country is a large exporter of food and just one scare story is all it takes for importers of this food to close their doors to it. So this affects one of the businesses which employs many thousands and is a major part of the economy and the results of a scare are well proven.

Putting all this at risk for a few people to do their own thing is just not on.

As regards game i believe that anything you shoot cannot be offered for sale or to another person without going through a licensed game dealer who would obviousley have to check the meat before he offers it for sale.

I am not saying things are perfect but there is some organised traceability at present. Have home kill and nobody would know where anything comes from or is going and within hours the cowboys after a quick buck would be in operation and nobodies livestock would be safe anywhere.

sh1tstirrer

marizpan wrote: »

We reared a jersey calf to six months last year. Killed out at 120kg deadweight. Great marbling and butcher was able to hang for 4 wks as there was enough fat. A great amount of meat for a family of four for a year. I think a bullock is just too much meat. Will do again this year. Cost very little to rear as the cow helped reared him n still plenty of milk for the house. Butcher cost €150

So if the calf killed out at 50% that means that your 6 month old jersey bull weighed 240 kg liveweight. Even if he were 40kg at birth he would have to gain over 1kg/day to reach that weight. How much milk did you give him and what else did you feed him. I am just wondering as I had a few jersey bulls that were like trying to fatten greyhounds as I couldn't fatten them.

Dusty87

fodda wrote: »

It is quite simple Dusty as others have also explained.

This country is a large exporter of food and just one scare story is all it takes for importers of this food to close their doors to it. So this affects one of the businesses which employs many thousands and is a major part of the economy and the results of a scare are well proven.

Putting all this at risk for a few people to do their own thing is just not on.

As regards game i believe that anything you shoot cannot be offered for sale or to another person without going through a licensed game dealer who would obviousley have to check the meat before he offers it for sale.

I am not saying things are perfect but there is some organised traceability at present. Have home kill and nobody would know where anything comes from or is going and within hours the cowboys after a quick buck would be in operation and nobodies livestock would be safe anywhere.

Im not talking about putting anything up for sale. Im talking about home use.

fodda

Dusty87 wrote: »

Im not talking about putting anything up for sale. Im talking about home use.

Agreed but if its legal for home kill how you going to stop those who want to make money from selling it?

Muckit

sh1tstirrer wrote: »

So if the calf killed out at 50% that means that your 6 month old jersey bull weighed 240 kg liveweight. Even if he were 40kg at birth he would have to gain over 1kg/day to reach that weight. How much milk did you give him and what else did you feed him. I am just wondering as I had a few jersey bulls that were like trying to fatten greyhounds as I couldn't fatten them.

Your not wrong there Sh1tstirrer

240kg at 6mths........ for a jersey?? God there's some suckler farmers just about achieving that with charolais'!

clonmahon

fodda wrote: »

I am not saying things are perfect but there is some organised traceability at present. Have home kill and nobody would know where anything comes from or is going and within hours the cowboys after a quick buck would be in operation and nobodies livestock would be safe anywhere.

I have pointed this out several times already, but traceability is not an issue with small scale production. It is a problem with industrial scale processed food production. Some processed food products have a bewildering array of ingredients coming from a vast range of sources. Some thing goes wrong with them and finding the cause can be a matter of great complexity, which is why there is a need for traceability.

This issue does not arise with simple, localised, food production systems. If an artisan producer makes a batch of lethal cakes, sells them at the local market and people start getting sick, how long do you think it will take the Environmental Health Officers to trace this back to its source. With small scale, simple, localised, production chains traceability is not a problem.

You guys are falling down the same hole as the Irish authorities you are not making a realistic assessment of risk. You are assuming that small scale local and home production should be regulated the same as industrial production.

As myself and several posters have pointed out several times already on this thread, small scale food producers on the continent are much more loosely regulated than they are in Ireland. This has not resulted in a great die off of consumers or food scares that have wrecked national economies. How do you guys explain this.

fodda

How how do you stop someone after a fast buck from moving in? Regulations?.........Thats what we have already.

clonmahon

fodda wrote: »

How how do you stop someone after a fast buck from moving in? Regulations?.........Thats what we have already.

But home killing is happening no matter what the regulations say. I have done it in the past and I know people who are doing it now. There are a lot of long lanes in the Ireland and not enough inspectors to look up them all. It is not an issue because it is happening on a small scale for home consumption and is being done very discreetly. If some one tried to make serious money out of this they would need to scale up operations and this would be very difficult to hide. Not just the production but the distribution.

Small scale home slaughtering is going on, it has not resulted in the market being flooded with illegal home killed meat. No one has died, the national economy has not been wrecked. You are postulating a problem that does not exist, you are imagining a risk where none exists. Your beloved regulations have not stopped it happening nor will they.

fodda I ask you a direct question, on the continent small scale food production is less tightly regulated that here, this has not resulted in a die off of consumers or food scares that have wrecked the French, Italian or Spanish economies. Can you suggest any reason why this might be.

Right through this thread several posters have gave examples of the lax regime that pertains on the continent, these are real world examples that appears to contradict your faith in the Irish regulatory regime. Are we to presume that food poisoning bugs in Ireland are more virulent than those in France, or might I be right in suspecting that the Irish regulations are witless stupidity.

fodda

I have no idea of the cases of food poisoning in other countries due to home reared meat........perhaps you could supply them? Are you saying there isnt any or never has been any and everything is perfect?

When you talk of stupidity of regulations, would you think it would be a wise thing to let totally untrained people start butchering animals in the garden sheds? Just because as you say it is going on hidden away down country lanes doesnt mean it is ok.

We are never going to agree on this, and i have no vested interest in keeping regulations, in fact as a home producer i should be siding with you, but i can just see that "one event" just waiting to happen, believe it or not in an agricultural country i think that most people are too far removed from home food production and are only just in the past few years starting to re-learn those skills.

clonmahon

fodda wrote: »

I have no idea of the cases of food poisoning in other countries due to home reared meat........perhaps you could supply them? Are you saying there isnt any or never has been any and everything is perfect?

I am saying as I have said several times already on this thread, there is a very different scale of risk involved in small scale food production, and applying the same regulations to small scale production as are applied to industrial scale production is grotesque, ridiculous and disproportionate.

Food safety authorities in France, Spain and Italy recognize this reality. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, this much more relaxed continental approach to small scale producers has not resulted in major outbreaks of food poisoning. See post numbers 38 and 40 on this thread for specifics.

France is not regarded as a dangerous place to eat, in fact many people myself included regard French food and cooking as among the finest on earth. An important part of this is the amazing variety of artisan production. You ask me is everything perfect in France, the answer is no. But it is no worse than it is here, in spite of the lax regulations.

There are two possibilities, 1 that food poisoning bugs are less dangerous is France or 2 small scale food production is not as dangerous as large scale production.

You ask about food poisoning caused by home reared meat. I would suggest food poisoning is not caused by the rearing or killing of meat. Food poisoning is caused by how raw meat is stored, handled and cooked in the kitchen. All raw meat is dangerous.

reilig

Clonmahon,

I agree with your points about the artizan producers in the countries that you identified. I also agree with your points about the risk being being reduced with teh scale of the processing facilities.

However, I still have a lot of concerns which I pointed out above, and have not been answered.

Would you advocate artizan producers/slaughters having lower standards than other meat processing facilities? Should they not be subject to HACCP inspections like all other food processing businesses in the country?
Should they have to use the same meat storage facilities (cold store) as any slaughter house? If not, why not?
Should they have to adhere to rules about slaughter methods on the basis of animal welfare?

How much per animal would this cost?

I brought 2 lambs to my local slaughter house last week. I'll be collecting them on thursday. They will be cut up, bagged and labelled into individual portions. The total cost of this is €50 - down from €70 last year. Aparently, hides have trebled in value and there is a growing market for offal in China which means taht they don't have to pay to have offal taken away anymore.

Could any artizan produce afford to establish a small scale slaughter facility and even maintain very basic Health and safert conditions (chill room, offal & blood collection and disposal) when there are already established slaughter houses, who are fully licensed, operate within the traceability scheme and can legally kill, skin, gut, hang, cut, pack and label a lamb for €25?

As for paperwork, there was very little - my lamb was tagged, and I had the relevant form filled in.

clonmahon wrote: »

I am saying as I have said several times already on this thread, there is a very different scale of risk involved in small scale food production, and applying the same regulations to small scale production as are applied to industrial scale production is grotesque, ridiculous and disproportionate.

Food safety authorities in France, Spain and Italy recognize this reality. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, this much more relaxed continental approach to small scale producers has not resulted in major outbreaks of food poisoning. See post numbers 38 and 40 on this thread for specifics.

France is not regarded as a dangerous place to eat, in fact many people myself included regard French food and cooking as among the finest on earth. An important part of this is the amazing variety of artisan production. You ask me is everything perfect in France, the answer is no. But it is no worse than it is here, in spite of the lax regulations.

There are two possibilities, 1 that food poisoning bugs are less dangerous is France or 2 small scale food production is not as dangerous as large scale production.

You ask about food poisoning caused by home reared meat. I would suggest food poisoning is not caused by the rearing or killing of meat. Food poisoning is caused by how raw meat is stored, handled and cooked in the kitchen. All raw meat is dangerous.

CJhaughey

You can kill a pig yourself. There is no law stating that you can't.
I know because I have a pig number and have kept plenty.