Britain? UK? - Scandalous revelations about where our food comes from, what it contains and how safe it is. Bernard Matthews and the H5N1 virus?

Not made in Britain

Extracts:

"With suspicions that an outbreak of bird flu at Bernard Matthews's Suffolk farm is linked to an earlier instance of the deadly H5N1 virus among geese in Hungary, warning bells have begun ringing over the origins of the food we eat. The fact that a Hungarian slaughterhouse used by the Matthews company is less than 30 miles from the source of the outbreak in geese, and equally close to the abattoir where 13,000 of the birds were gassed last month, means it is now seen as a possible source of cross-contamination. While the company has repeatedly claimed that there is "no connection" between its Hungarian operation and bird flu in Suffolk, a link appears increasingly likely."

"The fact is that "food fraud" as it is known, is big business and stretches across a range of key products. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) believes that about 10 per cent of our weekly shopping may be "counterfeit". Many of the everyday goods that we buy - honey, orange juice, ham, butter and coffee - generate serious money for the food cheats. From printing misleading labels to diluting or modifying the food itself, it has become more commonplace than ever for suppliers to dupe consumers."

"Two months ago, an inspection by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) at one Worcestershire supermarket supplier raised suspicions that battery-farmed eggs were being packaged and labelled as the more expensive free-range option. With such a wide distribution network, these eggs could have found their way on to supermarket shelves all across the country."

"...a turkey can spend its entire life in another country and then be processed here and presented as British: that is clearly wrong, even if it isn't against the regulations. And it isn't just with poultry. In the pork industry there has been the problem of supermarkets bringing in legs of pork from Denmark, processing them here, and labelling them British."

"Almost all supermarket chicken ready meals use Thai chicken. For example, your local Morrisons supermarket's Chicken Tikka Masala, priced at £2.99, says "produced in the UK" on its label. Indeed it was, but the chicken comes from Thailand...Bulking up a chicken breast with water is, the [FSA]agency has discovered, an old supplier's trick. One of its recent surveys established that almost half the frozen chicken breasts examined had a meat content of between five and 26 per cent less than appeared on the packaging, and that some chicken breasts contained as much as 43 per cent added water."