What's the story with the origin of meat?Could you spot the difference between smoked Irish salmon and Irish smoked salmon - or is there any difference?
While they certainly look similar, the difference could be thousands of miles. Smoked Irish salmon definitely comes from Ireland, while Irish smoked salmon could have been sourced anywhere from Chile to Clifden, with just the smoke added closer to home, allowing the product to be labelled in a way which has the potential, at the very least, to seriously mislead shoppers about its provenance.
And there is a financial imperative behind making consumers think a product is more Irish than might be the case. Repeated studies have shown that shoppers prefer their food to be locally produced, either out of a desire to support local business or because they believe it to be of better quality.
For the most part, shoppers rely on the brand names emblazoned on the packaging to inform them about a product's origins. So they assume that Donegal Catch salmon, Boyne Valley honey and William Shaw's traditional ham, to name just three popular products, are always made in Ireland using Irish ingredients, when the reality may be somewhat different.
The small print on Donegal Catch salmon identifies the fish as being of Norwegian, Irish, Chilean or Scottish origin, while Boyne Valley honey contains honey from multiple sources, many of which are a long, long way from the Boyne.
The packaging and the misty-eyed, Olde Worlde advertising campaign behind William Shaw's traditional bacon could lead people to believe the product is exclusively made with Irish meat, but Shaw's is owned by Breeo Foods, a subsidiary of co-op giant Dairygold, and its bacon could just as easily have come from the Netherlands, Denmark or Scotland.
Later this week RTÉ's Ear to the Groundtakes to the supermarket and raises its sceptical eyebrows at the way the food on the shelves can be presented to the buying public. It claims there is "total confusion over the labelling of Irish products" and in a quick supermarket sweep finds a basketful of products carrying labels which could, at best, be described as perplexing.
MUCH OF THE confusion centres on processed pork products, and the farming lobby is adamant that an ever-decreasing amount of locally-sourced pork is being used in brands which most people take for granted are Irish. According to the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA), some 60,000 tonnes of pork are imported into Ireland each year. Last autumn, consumers were even urged by former workers and pig suppliers to boycott Galtee pork and bacon products because, they said, the producer did not clearly state where it sourced all its meat.
Like Shaw's, Galtee is owned by Breeo - and ultimately Dairygold - and has consistently rejected the criticisms which are levelled at it, insisting that annual independent audits show it continues to purchase the same substantial quantity of Irish pig meat every year since it ceased pig slaughtering in 2004.
According to a recent survey from the IFA, most consumers identify Irishness with the brand names and the advertising associated with certain products. The survey also found that 70 per cent of people polled admitted to being unaware of what they should be looking for when it comes to buying Irish produce.
The IFA surveyed 2,000 people at last year's ploughing championship and two-thirds of them said they assumed that brands such as Denny and Galtee were 100 per cent Irish. "The consumer is being duped by Irish brands that were built on quality Irish product," said IFA National Pigs Committee Chairman Michael Maguire. "Both the product and the brand continue to exist, but unfortunately they exist separately. The Irish product that created the brand has been displaced with meat of an unknown origin."
The Bord Bia Quality Mark is one way of quickly establishing the origins of certain products and its stated aim is to provide assurances that products have been produced to the highest standards and all meat can be traced back to the farms on which the animals were reared. Backed by an extensive advertising campaign in recent months, recognition of the Quality Mark is growing and now stands at nearly 80 per cent among consumers, with the majority saying that the logo would make them more inclined to buy a particular product.
Recently the IFA highlighted what it claimed was an ever more serious form of misleading labelling. The chairman of its sheep committee Henry Burns said certain supermarkets were selling legs of lamb stamped from New Zealand but re-labelled as Irish.
"This re-labelling raises very serious questions, is totally contradictory and highly misleading," he said. He called for a ministerial investigation to be launched.
The problem of label confusion is not unique to this country. Late last year, Marks & Spencer came under fire from the UK's largest manufacturing union over imports of cheaper meat from abroad. The retailer was accused of sourcing meat and poultry cheaply from non-EU countries to make more profit.
THE STORE WAS criticised for prominently labelling certain meat products as British or Irish, while using only small labels on the side or back for products from Brazil and Thailand. The union accepted that other food chains were equally guilty, but said it chose to demonstrate against M&S because of the retailer's ethical stance. "We are targeting M&S because they preach that they are an ethical company but at the end of the day they are putting profits before people," a union spokesman said.
In response, M&S said it already stated country of origin on the front of all fresh meat products, and whether any of its meat products had been previously frozen. It said all prepared food was clearly labelled with country of origin on the back of pack. "M&S has a leading position in both labelling and labour standards and we work very hard with our suppliers to maintain these high standards." It said that all M&S fresh beef, pork and chicken came from Britain and Ireland, as did its lamb when in season.
