Irish Pork Recall

By -
All Irish Pork products have been recalled because of a dioxin safety scare. Confidence in beef is surely to be hit also. This will have a serious impact on these industries.

Ironically I have been finding it increasingly more difficult to actually buy Irish pork and beef. Whenever I go to the supermarket for ham for my sandwiches it takes me ages to figure out if the ham is actually from Ireland or not. Often there are no Irish ham slices at all. Of course many traditional Irish brands no longer use Irish meat preferring to source it in Brazil.

This places these faux-Irish brands in a well deserved position. By not coming clean on the product labels about where the meat is actually sourced, they will suffer the same fate as the Irish products at a time when they could be cleaning up because of the scare. Now the misleading Paddy's Irish Style Rashers and Sausages are suddenly less attractive than the more honest Paulo's Pork and Samba Sausage.

Aldi refuses to say where many of its products are from.

Anyway all bets are off as far as I'm concerned. There was the chicken scare some months back, and now this. The government should have strict controls on all parts of the food chain and people in the food business should know their supplies. I'm not going to pay twice the price anymore for Irish meat. I'll buy the cheap and cheerful meat from who knows where, and us the money I save to buy health insurance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spencer Tunick (non) Exhibition

By -
Image
The exhibition of photographs taken by Spencer Tunick last year was on recently. It was called an exhibition, but they didn't even go to the expense of making prints. The photos were projected from a PC. It is interesting that despite the huge fanfare that accompanied the taking of the photographs, the display of the photos themselves was a non-event. The artist, as far as I know, did not even put in an appearance. This suggests that my suspicions were justified. It was never about creating photographs. It was about hundreds of people getting naked in a field. The photography was a side show. I am a bit disappointed by the pictures that were displayed. I found some of Tunick's other work very interesting. The Blarney pictures are a bit twee, sort of John Hinde postcards with naked people.
Read more

Bye Bye Eircom

By -
My Eircom broadband will be disconnected in the next 24 hours. The company made the classic mistake that large incumbent near-monopoly operators make : denial. For almost two weeks I had problems with my internet service. I concluded it was an issue with the name servers. I went several times to the Eircom website to see if it was a known issue but there was nothing there. When I eventually read about the problem it was in the Irish Times . I continued to have problems but the Eircom website insisted that although there had been a problem it had since been resolved. When I contacted Eircom to find out how to have my service disconnected (there's no easy way to find this information) I got a form response telling me that all was well, but telling me none of the things I asked for. When I eventually spoke to someone today I got the expected "not our fault" attitude. That was a mistake. "Eircom is very very sorry" was the only appropriate stance to take. At var...
Read more

Weeds Season 3

By -
I like Weeds. The episodes are short and densely packed with plot and wit. It is a dark drama based on a widow who turns to drug dealing to support her suburban lifestyle. There's plenty of interesting commentary and observation of the conformity of suburban life, and the thin veneer that covers the dark goings on behind closed doors. Weeds inhabits the same world as American Beauty. I think though that it misses the mark slightly. The problem with Weeds is that it is not dark enough. The inevitable violence of the drug business has a cartoon quality. So the danger that drives much of the plot and the tension is somewhat unreal. When one character is very seriously injured in a non-drug related incident, his injuries and his pain and suffering are played for laughs. Some interesting characters have become cartoon stereotypes. So when another character is beaten up (off screen) by a drug gang it's hard to take it seriously. Instead of being like the Desperate Housewives meets...
Read more