A law which bans horses from Romanian roads might be the reason behind the fraudulent sales of horse meat on the European beef market, as hundreds of thousands of animals were sent to the abbatoir when the country’s road rules changed, reports the Independent.
Food industry officials in France have speculated that some of the “horse meat” which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden might turn out to be donkey meat.
“Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
After Britain’s horsemeat scandal spread to France, preliminary investigations by a French agency uncovered the bizarre route taken by the “fake” beef: it apparently came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.
Tasty.
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