WE ARE WHAT WE EAT

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Tiz. I'll stick to the green stuff with the sediment!
Good news Comrade but the route to it is not recommended!

[Stanley]

Disturbing account on Today of tests done on Red Tractor pork chops sold in Tesco as certified British produce. Using sophisticated isotope testing it was discovered that there was a 99% certainty that some were pork from the Netherlands. Very embarrassing and does nothing for consumer confidence in the Red Tractor label. What I think is even more disturbing is that the normal audit trail of provenance didn't flag this up.

[hartley353]

Topic of conversation in the post office this morning, Deadly pork sausages. It would seem if you dont incinerate them at 70 degrees C for 20 minutes, then one in ten may give you hepatitus. What a wonderful world we live in, progress is a poisonous sausage.

[PanBiker]

I'm doomed! It only took ten minutes to make the sausage butty that I had for dinner. This might be my last post.

[PostmanPete]

I'm doomed! It only took ten minutes to make the sausage butty that I had for dinner. This might be my last post.

If you don't make it Ian, I'll make good use of your booking for Zakynthos...........

[PanBiker]

Hard luck Pete, good news or bad, whichever way you look at it is that I seem to have survived so the Ionian island is not up for grabs.

[hartley353]

I have never timed a sausage in my life so I got some out of the freezer to experiment. Whilst they were defrosting the Mrs pointed out that they were venison, so even if the experiment goes wrong I won't die.

[Tizer]

I have never timed a sausage in my life so I got some out of the freezer to experiment. Whilst they were defrosting the Mrs pointed out that they were venison, so even if the experiment goes wrong I won't die.

When my Uncle George was a butcher I don't recall anyone dying from eating his sausages but having been a young helper in their manufacture I can say that they were a serious occupational hazard if you tried to make them too fast!

[Stanley]

Sorry to interrupt the fun but the concern for me is that this damages the Red Tractor label as an assurance of quality. The British pork industry has enough problems without having one of their main marketing tools put under suspicion. Mind you, anyone who buys supermarket sausage without making sure they are thoroughly cooked deserves all they get.

[hartley353]

A search of my cook books found no results on how long you should cook a sausage for. My normal sausage supplier says 12-15 mins, but he had to think about it, so could be of the top of his head. There are so many foods that i cook to taste, with fillet steak I barely warm it above room temp, with sirloin I brown only the outside. All fish is a guessing game and I would always err on the just undercooked side, and trust that it is edible.

[Bruff]

The only lesson from this tale perhaps is that a lot of nonsense is spoken in queues at Post Offices! Only joking. Once ground pork in a sausage hits about 60 - 65 degress C, take it off the heat and leave it for a few minutes, which will raise the temperature further a little bit, and then scoff it. No need to leave it at 70 for 20mins at all.

This is ground pork. Internal temperatures (which vary by meat and what you want rare/medium etc) are only relevant to ground meat, so ground beef and lamb etc too. With whole cuts it's the surface temperature you need to keep an eye on as this is where any nasties lie - with ground meat any nasties are dispersed throughout. But a temperature of about 60 - 65 is fine to kill the surface nasties, which when you know meat doesn't actually brown until the surface temperature reaches a little over 100 or thereabouts means there's very little to bother about.

Statistics actually show very few folk get seriously ill through the inadequate cooking of their meat. It's cross-contamination usually. And I'm not suggesting everyone goes out and invests in a thermometer. One's eyes and a prodding finger are enough.

Richard Broughton

[Tizer]

With whole cuts it's the surface temperature you need to keep an eye on as this is where any nasties lie...

And we rely on the agricultural industry for maintaining that situation. It's not so long ago that it wouldn't have been true - in the past you would have had a strong chance of getting infected with parasites if you didn't cook meat right through (and still can if you're abroad in some countries). In the late 1900s the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool was puzzled by finding a high incidence of beef tapeworm in Liverpudlian men, almost literally on its own doorstep. Not only were they surprised by the number of infections but also because it was usually pork tapeworm in the UK, not beef, that caused the trouble. The puzzle was solved when they learned that many Liverpudlian housewives made sandwiches of raw minced beef for their husbands' lunches.

[hartley353]

The sausages took 14.5 mins under the grill on high, turning on 4 occasions, they came out golden brown and tasted grand. They were very fat sausages so thin link would take less time, so my supplier was not far out. When I lived in barlick we had a butchers son in our class, he used to eat them raw wonder if he made old bones.

[hartley353]

Apologies to Stanley for digressing on his red tractor issue. There is a system of traceability in place in this country that follows an animal from the farm to the table and monitors its handling through all stages. For a supermarket to have a product on its shelf which is not what it states shows corruption. One would hope the supermarket will now take its buyers to task, and them their suppliers, if not then there customers ought to shop elsewhere, they can't be trusted.

[Stanley]

In a way I'm lucky because my mother always made sure everything was well cooked and early experience like that means that I always make sure everything is cooked properly. My Grand Slam of infection in 1953/54 when I was in the military hospital at Hanover for over two months with what they eventually determined was Botulism (plus just about every other bad bug according to the doctors) was caused by a badly re-heated meat pie in the NAAFI. They told me than that I had the best load of antibodies I could have because normally Botulism was fatal. Since then I have only once had a problem and that was another re-heated time bomb, the first bacon butty BR served on and early London train out of Leeds. Almost certainly left over from the day before. What I draw from that is that once food is cooked it should be treated with great care and on the whole, don't trust commercial outlets where re-heating can be a factor.

[Tizer]

The Cargill food & agriculture company opened a new poultry operation in Lai’an, Anhui, China, on 23 September. It covers each stage of the poultry supply chain, including chicken breeding, raising, feed production, hatching, slaughtering, and processing. You can see why they want to be in China when they say that the factory has the capacity to process approximately 65 million chickens per year, as well as 176,000 tons of poultry products per year. Total investment for the project is approximately US$250 million. I wonder whether it's all for consumption in China or will we see Cargill's Chinese chickens on our supermarket shelves?

[hartley353]

[quote="Tizer"]The Cargill food & agriculture company opened a new poultry operation in Lai’an, Anhui, China, on 23 September. It covers each stage of the poultry supply chain, including chicken breeding, raising, feed production, hatching, slaughtering, and processing. You can see why they want to be in China when they say that the factory has the capacity to process approximately 65 million chickens per year, as well as 176,000 tons of poultry products per year. Total investment for the project is approximately US$250 million. I wonder whether it's all for consumption in China or will we see Cargill's Chinese chickens on our supermarket shelves?[/quote
Argentina had a factory processing one million chickens a week ten years ago.

[plaques]

I have always viewed the food manufacturing industry with a great deal of suspicion. Since the bottom line is to create profit anything that will ultimately had to the profit margin is actively pursued. Just think of the temptation of reducing costs on this amount of products. It may well help to feed the world but ultimately there will be a price to pay in quality and integrity.

[Stanley]

Dead right P. I don't trust them or Cargill which is a straight money-making organisation based on massive ownership of resources. I'll stick to reading the literature, reading the labels and buying non processed food from local sources and cooking it myself.

[Tizer]

It's no wonder that the USA has such a big (no pun) obesity problem. A new report has revealed that the nutrition data used for the last 39 years has dramatically under-estimated the energy (calorie) intake of the US population, and especially of the obese group. The problem has arisen from the use of self-reporting (will they never learn?), i.e. depending on people responding truthfully to surveys. The latest work has found that many of the self-reported energy intakes were not plausible - the individuals couldn't have survived on the intake reported. The new report says: "Across the 39-year history of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), energy intake data on the majority of respondents (67.3% of women and 58.7% of men) were not physiologically plausible."

The US Institute of Food Technologists says: "The study examined data from 28,993 men and 34,369 women, 20–74 years old...and looked at the caloric intake of the participants and their energy expenditure, predicted by height, weight, age, and sex. The results show that—based on the self-reported recall of food and beverages—the vast majority of the NHANES data are "physiologically implausible, and therefore invalid,” according to the study authors. In other words, the “calories in” reported by participants and the “calories out,” don’t add up and it would be impossible to survive on most of the reported energy intakes. This misreporting of energy intake varied among participants, and was greatest in obese men and women who underreported their intake by an average 25% and 41% (i.e., 716 and 856 calories per-day, respectively)."

The USA not only has a crisis in its handling of the nation's financial affairs but a crisis in its understanding of the nation's health and nutrition.
The full scientific paper is available here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0076632

[plaques]

It has been my theory for some time that obese people don't eat enough. Although reasonably active my intake is about 3000 calories per day with a BMI of 24. Most obese people that I talk to only eat about 1500 calories a day. Therefore, it is obvious that the less you eat the fatter you get. Its the same logic as Mr Cameron uses when he implies that the less you earn the better your standard of living. Perhaps someone is telling porkies!

[Stanley]

The book Tizer sent me, 'Know What to Eat' has a very plausible and well-supported explanation. High carbohydrate/low fat diets brought in by the spurious attack on saturated fat plus the imbalance of Omega-3 to Omega 6 fats coincide with the abrupt rise in obesity. See Bob's Bits today as well.....

[plaques]

Cause and effect are sometimes very difficult to prove an may sometimes be totally misleading. eg; the incidence of "drownings" coincides with an increase in ice cream sales. I have NOT read the book so I can't comment on its content. My observations, for what they are worth, is that obese people never appear to stop eating, either walking down the street or sat watching TV. What triggers this behaviour, as you suggest, may well be down to what they are eating. However, I still think that like alcoholics they deceive themselves into believing they are not over consuming.

[Stanley]

You're right P. and they have never taken the trouble to investigate nutrition, they believe the adverts, take the easy way out and then wonder why (a) They get fat and (b) their food costs so much.

[hartley353]

Early morning forage resulted in enough sweet chestnuts to last till xmas, half a dozen mushrooms for Sunday breakfast and a small bag of crab apples, I usualy think no futher than crab apple jelly, so may do a web search for ideas. The dogs put a few wild pheasants up so may be a chance of meat soon.