Tesco Horseburgers

[keith lockey]

I was that sick and tired of you lot going on about Tesco's horsemeat that I went out and bought some for my tea. And you know what, lads, it was Champion...Mind you it could have been Trigger or Silver as well.

[Pete]

The only burgers that I remember in the sixties were ham burgers, just as well our we might have been eating dead Galloways from the pit.

Edited January 20, 2013 by Pete

[Keith Scantlebury]

[Symptoms]

When I was a student I came back up to the North East for the Summer and got a holiday job in a meat processing factory on the quayside in Newcastle, this was 1970. The factory made pies and sausages for the street sellers who flogged the stuff on the streets in the Toon ... our older viewers will remember these sellers with their bicycle-powered stalls (they were really tricycles with the white painted stall at the front); swarms of them would also be seen flogging their stuff at Toon matches.

Anyway, there were big open vats with gas rings below for heating the ingredients and my job was to stir the mix with a big paddle. The problem was that the factory had glass roof windows (northlights) and exposed structural steel roof supports. Quite a few of the windows were broken so the pigeons got in and roosted on the roof beams. There was a high mortality rate in this resident bird population so in the mornings on arrival at work one of my jobs was to collect the corpses and dispose of the bodies. I was told by the foreman to drop them in the cooking mix as this is what they had always done ... I worked there for three weeks. This is a true story.

Needless to say that I have NEVER eaten bought pie or sausage since I was 19.

[keith lockey]

That's one of the reasons I turned veggie, Symptoms. I once worked at a battery farm - hens. And I was appalled at the conditions there. Row after row of chickens cooped up in cages and everything was getting mixed into their feed. It was arguably one of the worst jobs I ever had - just to make a few extra pounds over Christmas. I was a fresh faced teenager then and it made me see the meat industry in a new light.

Edited January 21, 2013 by keith lockey