Kerre Woodham: Better meat labelling needed

5:30 AM Sunday Jan 27, 2013

Packing date is not always a good guide. Photo / NZ Herald

If I'm buying meat from the supermarket, I want to know when it was killed and packed into its wrapping. I have no interest in the day in which it went on to the supermarket shelves or into the shop's fridge - I want to be able to base my buying on the freshness and the quality of the product.

There was a story this week of a Hawke's Bay man who bought a couple of legs of lamb from his local supermarket "Packed on January 16".

He thought, as I would have done, that that meant the lamb had been frolicking round in a field until a couple of days before the 16th.

No.

What he found out after he opened the package and found that the meat was rotten was that the lamb had been killed last year - December 18, in fact.

The 16th was when it was put out for sale. Disgusting and misleading.

The sooner we have watertight rules for food labelling, including country of origin and best before dates, the better.

- Herald on Sunday

john (Grey Lynn) | 11:45AM Tuesday, 29 Jan 2013

Obviously a stuff up by the supermarket. For certain cuts the best time to cook for culinary quality is some time after the "best before date" . Its not economical for processors to age meat properly. If you buy a certain cut near its time of best before the store has indavertently aged the product for you and you get the added benefit of buying at a lower cost.

mchaggis (Auckland Region) | 11:46AM Tuesday, 29 Jan 2013

Absolutely right Kerre. Our food labeling rules are slack, considering we are a food producing nation. It seems without doubt, domestic consumers always get the bum's deal when it comes to meat, not just in misleading dates etc, which is bad enough, but also quality, which is normally at the lower end of the scale! In other words, it's crap!

Time to up the game I think and introduce some honest transparency when it comes to food production, including the origin of product, through strict regulation and laws, to protect the consumer.

Observer2 (China) | 11:46AM Tuesday, 29 Jan 2013

Absolutely. N Z meat exports have to meet these basic food safety criteria when items are displayed for retail sale in most marketplaces in Europe and the U S. Many N Z food products are cheaper overseas as well. So how do these cowboy, gouging supermarkets and others escape such requirements in N Z ?