Food Safety: what comes round goes round

By Richard North - March 31, 2023

The current edition of Farmers Weekly, published yesterday, stepped outside its normal bounds with an exclusive report revealing a “massive food fraud and safety scandal”.

British farmers, we were told, “are being ripped off by an industrial-scale country-of-origin fraud in a scandal that has engulfed almost the entire food retail sector, as well as some major food service outlets”, with the magazine revealing that “up until at least the end of 2020”, a food manufacturer had been passing off huge quantities of foreign pork – sometimes tens of thousands of tonnes a week – as British.

The processor was not named by the FW but it has now been identified as Derbyshire-based Loscoe Chilled Foods, which has gone into administration and laid off all its staff.

In the FW, the company was accused by former employees of regularly “washing” hams that were visibly off, and mixing rotting pork with fresh product for further processing. Other products such as ox tongues were not heat treated properly, and meat was sometimes thawed out on the factory floor, posing a serious food safety risk. Two former employees claimed that test reports, detailing checks for potential pathogens such as listeria and E coli, were falsified.

Meat processed by the company ended up in products such as ready meals, quiches, sandwiches and other produce sold in Tesco, Asda, Co-op, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer. Food manufacturer and distributor Oscar Mayer, which supplies Sainsbury’s, Aldi, Ikea, Subway and airline food producer Dnata, was another customer, as were major brands Princes and BidFood.

Schools, hospitals, care homes and prisons were also indirectly supplied, with one source alleging the most rotten meat would end up there. “I used to tell them about it”, one source said. “I used to [say] ‘you can’t do this’. [The reply was] ‘Do you want the effing job? Get back in there’”.

Criminal practices are thought to have been perpetrated for at least two decades, and very likely beyond 2020, apparently undetected by customers whose site auditors are said to have been deceived during their visits.

One former employee said: “They did surprise audits, but they’ve got 15 minutes to be in. I’ve been there before when that’s happened. It was 6am and they’re knocking on the front door to come in. The first thing they do is bring them in, give them a cup of tea”.

He continued: “By that time, there’s a text message come down to one of the phones [and] everybody is on the job, pushing stuff onto lorries, getting rid of them. So when they walk in, it’s all nice”.

Another source said if the meat was not hidden on lorries, employees would push any suspect product around the top of the circle-shaped factory. “The auditor would be walking round with the management, and they would get employees to push it round at the same time, so they never met it”, he said.

Prior to 2018, some of the meat that wasn’t seen by auditors would be hidden in a secret chiller, but its location was eventually reported to authorities, which forced the processor to put it on the site plan.

Now the brown stuff has hit the fan, we learn that the National Food Crime Unit (NFCU), part of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), has been investigating how UK supermarket chain Booths may have been supplied with mislabelled, pre-packed sliced meat in 2021 – news of which emerged a few weeks ago.

However, on Wednesday 22 March, trading standards officers from Derbyshire County Council and environmental health teams joined police on an unannounced visit to the factory, as part of a live criminal investigation into the alleged food fraud and food safety offences. Three people were arrested but have now been released while the investigations continue.

As to the allegations of food safety offences and claims that auditors have been “deceived”, one can only say wearily that we’ve been there before.

As I wrote at the height of the horsemeat scandal in 2013, since the food scares of the late 1980s and ’90s, we have seen a sea-change in regulation, both in scale and type, with far too much reliance on paperwork “audits” rather than on searching physical inspections.

Furthermore, with the centralisation of the meat inspection service – directly under the FSA since 2010 – and the detachment of food safety monitoring of fresh meat and meat products from the local authority base, the intelligence network has broken down, making large-scale fraud harder to detect.

There is a Brexit element here in that the centralised system was imposed by EU law. Leaving the EU presented an opportunity to restore the holistic, local authority-based system and rebuild the badly-fragmented food safety surveillance system.

Sadly, that opportunity has been missed. While reports of failures proliferate, there has been no structured attempt to revisit or enhance food safety systems, making us extremely vulnerable to a powerful and damaging food scare.

This new scandal has yet to peak, but already the political fallout is making itself felt, as no fewer than three newspapers report today that Defra secretary Thérèse Coffey is considering bringing the FSA under her department’s control over its alleged failure to prevent mislabelled and rotten pork entering the retail food market.

In The Times we have the headline: “Rotten meat scandal could lead to Defra taking charge of FSA”, and in the Telegraph we see “Food Standards Agency attacked over rotten meat scandal as minister threatens to place it in special measures”.

Then, with unconscious irony, the Guardian tells us: “Reports of rotten pork being sold in UK may lead to tighter control of FSA”, with the sub-heading “Therésè Coffey may bring Food Standards Agency, now overseen by health department, under remit of Defra”.

Where the irony stands, of course, rests with the food scares of the 1980s and 90s, when the departmental responsibility for food safety rested with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). As the ministry fumbled through the salmonella, the listeria and then the BSE scares, it was widely condemned and the cry went up for an independent food standards agency.

Pundits wanted it divorced from MAFF, which was branded “the farmers’ friend”, and made responsible to the department of health. And very much in the lead of the campaign was the Guardian.

The Food Standards Agency finally arrived in the year 2000, while the MAFF was reformed as Defra in June 2001, having already been stripped of its responsibility for food safety.

When the European Food Safety Authority was set up in 2002, the place of the FSA was assured as one of the network of national agencies reporting to the European body, building “the European food safety knowledge ecosystem”.

Now, after a series of egregious failures, even the Guardian – apparently unaware of its own historic advocacy – seems to have fallen out of love with the FSA and is able to report, without protest, a possible change of status which would previously have had it manning the barricades.

“Sit long enough in one place, and the whole world will pass by”, a Chinese philosopher once said. Sit a little longer and the Guardian will completely reverse its position, without even realising it has done so.