Irish Beef Accountability And Why We Need It In Canada
While doing all my shopping at Centra and the exceptional time at a Tesco or Super Quinn supermarkets besides noticing the drastically lower food prices compared to Vancouver, I never once paid more than 3 Euros for a single item and many of my purchases cost only cents such as canned beans which were 14 cents a can. I also noticed signs in the meat and dairy sections which said that all products were traceable, curious I went to go read these signs in more detail. It said that every single cow derived product ranging from a steak to a brick of cheese could be traced back to the farm it came from. I was shocked to see this as I cannot count the number of times in my life I have gotten sick off food be it from the grocery store or a restaurant and when I call them they say they cannot do anything since they don’t know where it comes from but will tell their supplier. This level of accountability made me envious of the food safety which they have in Ireland that is lacking in Canada. I read the sign further and was flat out dumbfounded when I saw that not only could the product say a container of butter could be traced back to the original farm or animal but each individual container of butter could be traced to the very cow that it comes from! This way if there is a problem as long as you have your original packaging, the product that made you ill could be traced to the very animal which it came from which allows them to pull that animal and every product it produced from the shelves until the problem is rectified. Furthermore, if a farm had too many instances of quality control issues the store would stop purchasing from that farmer which only makes the quality control that much higher. While I did take a food and agribusiness marketing class and it had a large section covering dairy farms there unfortunately was not a field trip to a dairy farm so I could not compare it to the dairy farm we saw in LFS 250 but I would have really liked to so I could see the differences especially when taking all of the tracking ability into account. This is something I think would be beneficial to all if it was exported from Ireland to every country in the world as food safety and accountability is such a vital thing. As it turns out I did not once get sick from eating any food in Ireland.