Abscesses in Meat

There is a lot of infection in farmed animals: Fight wounds. Wounds to the feet and legs caused by inappropriate flooring. Wounds caused by dirty needles or shonky injections techniques. Lesions caused by stressed animals biting one another’s ears and tails. Ear tip necrosis, which is common in young pigs.³ Pleuritis, which is endemic in British pig farms,⁴ and causes lesions in the lungs that can spread. It’s an absolute smorgasbord of filth.

Hygiene inspectors in slaughterhouses look for these infections using only their eyes and it is up to slaughterhouse workers to ‘trim’ them from the carcasses. But with hundreds of thousands of animals entering UK slaughterhouses every single day, it would take someone with an extraordinarily optimistic disposition to believe that every pocket of pus is detected and removed. And even if our Great British system was flawless, what about the vast amounts of imported meat on our shelves? The union that represents meat inspectors in the EU, where most of the imported meat comes from, asserts that diseased meat is being eaten in the UK, including pus from abscesses and tuberculosis lesions.⁵ All this before we get to the increasing amounts of meat imported to the UK illegally in the boots of cars⁶… and no one seems to know where that ends up.