Meat the men of the moment in Tenbury (From Ludlow Advertiser)

Meat the men of the moment in Tenbury

8:00am Sunday 3rd March 2013 in News By Adrian Kibbler

BUTCHERS in Tenbury are benefitting from public concern in the wake of the horse meat scandal.

Selina Bowkett from Bowketts in Tenbury said that there has been an increase in sales especially of meatbased meals like lasagne and cottage pies.

The store makes its own meat products using locally sourced meat.

“It has not been as much with beef burgers but we have found that there is more interest in our own meat based meals and more people are buying them,” she said.

Matt Sylvester from the Food Hall in Tenbury the aim was to keep buyers informed on where their food came from.

“We source all our meat locally so no one needs to be concerned that it has come hundreds of miles from a foreign country,” Matt said.

“I think we are fortunate because being a rural town people use local butchers and want to know where the meat they eat has been sourced.

“There also seem to be a lot of new faces shopping in Tenbury which is good news.”

Smaller independent butchers all say that interest in locally sourced meat has been greater since the controversy about horse meat being passed as beef.

Sales of locally made meat produce have been boosted by the high profile news coverage of the issues surrounding the mislabelling and use of horse meat and local butchers who make their own burgers from locally sourced meat are in demand.

But only time will tell if people shocked into buying locally by the revelations make a permanent change or revert to type when the issue is no longer headline news.

The quality and knowing where food has come from is a major element in the Taste of Tenbury campaign that is on-going to promote local shops.

Local independent butchers believe that they will benefit from people taking more interest in where their food comes from and tighter rules on labelling.

One of the supermarket meals involved in the recent controversy was shown to be beef that turned out to be horse meat from Romania that found itself on British plates via processing plants and distribution warehouses in France and Luxemburg.

The different taste between beef and horse meat can often be lost in the production process especially in products where breadcrumbs and other ‘fillers’ are used.