Unfit Meat

Is the food you buy produced to the highest standards?

Unfit Meat - the result of an eight-month investigation by the BBC - is a chilling insight into the UK meat industry.

Posing as a meat supplier, reporter Mike Radford uncovers an illegal slaughterhouse killing thousands of chickens a week.

The slaughterhouse was supplying shops and restaurants across the South East.

Independent food safety expert John Barrow described the slaughterhouse as the most appalling he had seen in his 30 years of working in the industry.

Radford also works undercover as a sheep rustler and befriends a Worcestershire farmer, with shops across the West Midlands, who tells him he is happy to sell illegal lamb to his customers.

The farmer explains on camera how he and other farmers flout BSE controls for profit and put potentially unfit meat into shops in Birmingham.

Finally, Radford investigates a leading poultry supplier with rigorous hygiene rules and discovers that, even at this top level of meat production, hygiene can sometime occur.

This programme was first broadcast on BBC Two on Tuesday, 28 January, 2003 at 2000 GMT.

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Further information

Foodlink is a website set up by the Food and Drink Federation and provides a complete guide to food safety, with links to all the relevant organisations.

www.foodlink.org.uk

The UK Food Standards Agency was set up on 1 April 2000. Its aim is to make sure that food is safe and also to offer independent, balanced advice.

www.foodstandards.gov.uk

The Consumers' Association and the Food Standards Agency have jointly published a leaflet which aims to show what is being done to protect people from BSE, what the symbols on labels mean and which countries have had BSE.

Beef and BSE

Reporter: Mike Radford
Producer: Amanda Pullin
Series Producer: Fiona Campbell
Executive Producer: Stewart Lansley