TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Posted: 19 Feb 2026, 03:34
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
14 April 2001
I apologise for using such an unimaginative heading for this piece but it says exactly what is in my mind. I believe that there are millions of ordinary decent people who are suffering frustration because they feel unable to exert any control over what is happening in Britain today. The root of the problem, and the reason it is so hard to address, is that we seem to be observing a breakdown in competence, common sense and expert management in so many areas of our lives. I don't need to lay out a detailed list, we can all construct our own. The consequence of this comprehensive breakdown is that there are too many targets, our frustration is generated by the fact that we do not know where to begin, and what can an individual do anyway?
My personal frustration has reached a level where I feel I have to do something constructive and effective and after a lot of thought I have come to two conclusions, I have the best chance of success if my attempt to influence events is well-focussed and efficiently delivered. My target is one where I have personal experience and considerable knowledge, the food industries. My method of dissemination is the internet because I believe that by this method ‘ordinary’ people have the best chance of combining to make their beliefs heard.
Can I say here that I believe that the power of the ‘ordinary’ people lies in the fact that collectively, they are the repository of more knowledge and experience than all the government agencies put together. As such, they are the most likely source of any consensus of common sense and must try to make themselves heard. Please read the rest of this document, and if you agree with it in principle, mail it to your friends or to any destination where you think the fact that it exists might concentrate thinking. The power it generates will be by virtue of the extent to which it is spread. Size does matter!
First, I must briefly establish my credentials. My name is Stanley Graham, I am retired, I have a brain and a very varied working experience. As a general transport driver, a cattle wagon driver and a repairer of very large boilers I have had access to many industrial plants and centres which are crucial elements in the food chain. Because I was there as an essential part of the process, I was invisible, I had the opportunity to observe what was happening without hindrance. I admit that my experience goes back over 50 years and some of the malpractices I saw have now been overtaken by events but this doesn't damage my basic thesis which is that the food industry has a fatal flaw as far as the consumer is concerned. The prime objective of the companies concerned is to make profit. In an ethos of globalisation leading to increased competition the main casualty is the standard of ethics inside these industries.
Over a year ago I was so disturbed about food quality that I wrote several letters to people who I thought might be influenced and this resulted in a request for an article which was published in a well-respected UK publication, 'The Food Magazine'. This is the house journal of the food Commission, a totally independent non-profit making organisation which will not allow advertising, thus preserving its independence. Bearing in mind that this was published in Spring 2000, here is the article.
WASTE NOT WANT NOT?
I think I may have been very lucky in my choice of parents, we are a long living family with an extremely varied ancestry. However, when I reach 100 years old and they ask me what the secret of long life is I shall tell them that it was most probably down to spending thirty years of my working life as a trucker and industrial boiler repairer. It gave me some clues as to what foods to avoid!
Forty years ago I used to wonder why I was carting bone meal, hoof and horn meal, bagged broiler house muck and greaves into animal feed manufacturers. (‘Greaves’ is the trade name for knacker yard meat meal which has been partially cooked and left to start putrefying as this makes it easier to process.) I found out that they were all high in protein and were an economic way of improving the analysis of the end product, cattle cake, and allowing cheap bulking agents like chopped straw to be used as well. During a long spell as a cattle wagon driver I asked the bloke I worked for why he always bought ‘coarse ration’ instead of cattle cake as it was so expensive. He said it was better for the cattle and the reason it was so dear was because you could take a handful and see exactly what was in it, a handful of cake told you nothing. Thirty years on I realised that what I had been looking at was the genesis of BSE in cattle and new variant CJD in humans. The only reason it had been done was to raise profit margins.
During the fifties and sixties I saw many more examples of this sort of adulteration. Greaves were used regularly as raw material at fat refiners. Skin oil, which is extracted from hides when they are processed, went to margarine and toilet soap manufacturers. (Large posters on the wall at the skin yard proclaimed ‘BEWARE OF ANTHRAX!’) Lanolin was extracted from wool scouring plants and sewage works. It went to the manufacturers of toiletries, particularly hand creams and lipstick. Limestone flour which is very finely powdered limestone rock went into the large industrial bread bakeries to provide the added calcium. I carried all these things and drew some conclusions from my knowledge. You’ve guessed it, don’t eat margarine, render your own dripping and avoid anything with lanolin in it!
I began to realise that whilst simple economics was the root factor which drove these practices there was another element, the use of waste which would otherwise have been a negative cost because it would have to be disposed of in some way. What a brilliant business ploy, convert waste which was a financial liability, into a by-product that could be sold to enhance profits!
Another job I had and enjoyed for years was carrying cattle for a very good and caring cattle dealer. Our trade was in high quality rearing calves for the dairy industry to Scotland and the best scotch heifers back down to Northern England for sale to dairy farmers, many of whom sold milk direct to the public through their own retail rounds in the surrounding towns. They were on high profits, bought good beasts and looked after their business. I loved the cattle and in all the time I drove for this man never had a casualty except for one still-born calf. (I used to have to stop and calve a beast many a time as I was bringing them down the country.) However, there was a trade in the markets that we went to which used to puzzle me. Many calves, particularly bull calves, are not worth rearing. One name for these is ‘bobby calves’, another, more accurate description is ‘killers’. As soon as their navels were dry (if they were lucky) these calves were taken into the market and sold to specialised dealers. I asked what they were used for and was told that the manufacturers of baby and geriatric foods bought them to render down for gravy. I have to say that I never delivered any of these calves to their final destination but have no reason to believe that what I was told was untrue. Only a couple of months ago I visited the dealer I used to work for and he told me that the killer trade was still active and that nowadays the dealers wanted calves with a little more age on them because ‘the meat will have firmed up.’ This signals to me that they are going for human consumption.
Later in my career I was working for a firm which repaired large industrial boilers. Many people use the phrase ‘Steam Age’ as a pejorative term to describe something which is out-of-date or obsolete. Nothing could be further from the truth, many industrial processes still require steam and one of the major users is the food industry. When we went in to repair a boiler we were invisible, an essential part of the furniture so the business of the plant went on as though we weren’t there. Because of this, in the course of my work over the last ten years I have seen further examples of the miracle which is turning waste into profit.
I have worked on a plant where out-of-date cheese and butter was brought in from supermarkets. The cheese was processed and emerged as mozzarella for pizza toppings. The butter was combined with vegetable oil from EEC intervention stocks that was anywhere from ten to fifteen years old, no mistaking this, it was clearly labelled and dated. The resulting goo was processed, I think by hydrogenation, and emerged as ‘baker’s shortening’ with a shelf life of six months.
I saw small vans coming into the same factory and unloading and enquired about them. They were providing a useful service to restaurants and chip shops by collecting their used cooking oil for free disposal. Needless to say, this was not a charitable enterprise, I don’t know what was being done with it but I think I could hazard a good guess. I was talking to man who knows about these things a few weeks ago and he told me that the service wouldn’t be free for much longer as the trade had taken a knock when some entrepreneur in Europe had decided that his profit margin could be boosted by augmenting his vegetable oil with used transformer oil! The big problem with this is that apart from the fact that it was mineral oil he was introducing heavy metals into the mix. Evidently this ploy had been discovered and the result was a drop in profit in the industry due to better regulation.
Another class of plant we worked in were the ‘protein converters’. These are factories which take in abattoir and meat processor’s offal and convert the waste into ‘protein granules’. Look on the side of a tin of pet food and you will find that ‘protein granules’ or ‘meat by-products’ figures in the list of contents. What this really means is chicken heads, feet, feathers and guts and any other by-product you can imagine from an abattoir. These are not in prime condition when they arrive at the plant and you can imagine the smell. The miracle is that when you open the tin of pet food it smells good enough to eat!
I realise that some of my knowledge on this subject is forty years old by now and some things have changed, however the lesson I have drawn from these experiences is even fresher than the products of the ‘miracle factories’ as I call them. It is quite simply that some essential questions are not being asked in the debate on food safety.
Food processors, manufacturers, retailers and restaurants should be made to account for their waste. There should be a clear audit trail which allows verification of the means of disposal. This regulatory framework should be tight enough to ensure that sub-standard food is not allowed re-entry into the food chain whether it be human or animal.
It is blindingly obvious now that abattoir waste should never have been allowed entry to herbivorous animal feed, the cost has far exceeded any savings that were made at the time. My argument is that equally damaging practices are still current and that nobody can tell what the consequences will be. It is common sense that once food has deteriorated it should be destroyed and not re-processed.
I have a fear for the young of this country. Talk to any medical person and ask them about the unexplained rise in things like wheezing after exercise, asthma, glue ear and food poisoning. We have no clear answers as to what is causing these disabilities. Suppose it was connected with re-cycling waste food? I’m all right, I eat butter, eggs, good local meat, cook for myself and bake my own bread. I’ve lived a hard life with lots of physical exercise so there’s a good foundation to my body. What’s the outlook for the young with a worsening diet and lack of physical work? The least we can do for them is to make sure that they aren’t forced to eat crap just to satisfy some multi-national’s profit motive.
(Published in the Food Magazine, Spring issue, 2000)
Since I wrote this article we in the UK have seen further evidence of the damage which can be done by allowing waste to re-enter the food chain. There was a report of rotten and cancerous turkey meat being diverted from its destination as raw material for the pet food industry to supermarket shelves after trimming and washing in salt water. A court case followed and I think three of the low level participants received minor sentences. There is another case of this nature involving two and a half tons of condemned poultry in the courts at the moment.
We are currently suffering the worst outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in recorded history. It is generally accepted that the most likely point of entry of the infection was via the feeding of infected food waste to pigs in the NE of England. I have two points to make here. One is allowed to be wise before the event and why didn’t the pet owners object to the fact that rotten and cancerous food was being fed to their pets. (It is a sad commentary on our collective attitudes but I have to say that this aspect surprised me more than the lack of public reaction to the fact that waste was being sold as ‘fresh food’!) Why wasn't swill sterilisation supervised better by the local authority? I think I have made my point in respect of the simple proposition that food waste should be destroyed and not re-cycled into the human food chain. Thanks for taking the time to read this, I appreciate it.
What triggered me off to write this to you all? As I said in my introduction, one of the baffling aspects of all this is how to make the decision what to attack. What moved me to make another attempt on food waste was my rage and frustration at the incompetence of government agencies to maintain decent levels of compassion and care in their handling of the present F&M outbreak. Because of monumental incompetence on the part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, hundreds of thousands of sheep are at this moment lambing out in the open in fields which are virtually mud baths, the lambs can't be cared for and are dying like flies. In any normal circumstances, anyone treating animals in this fashion would be immediately prosecuted but it is being forced on individual farmers because of inflexible regulations and an inability to take responsibility and allow practical experience and common sense to dictate a solution.
This is what I alluded to in my introduction. There is a root cause to the problems in the food industry, the cruelty and lack of compassion towards our animals and the wider malaise which is affecting many other spheres of life in the UK. The nearest I can get to it at the moment is that it is incompetent management exacerbated by the over-arching tyranny of the profit motive. Apart from the direct disadvantages produced by this ethos which are affecting both animals and humans, the very fact that it is occurring is the strongest criticism of the system. If proper cost-benefit analysis was applied to all these cases I suspect it could be proved that practices leading to short term gain by individual companies have resulted in long term penalties of immense proportions. Contrast the gains from feeding animal waste to herbivores with the costs of BSE. The alleged rogue ham sandwich fed to the pig in the NE of England that led to our current outbreak of F&M because regulations controlling sterilisation of swill weren't properly enforced.
One last, and very pessimistic word, I have a terrible suspicion that what we are looking at is the tip of a very large iceberg. Why are so many of our children suffering from glue ear, wheezing after exercise and asthma? Make up your own list, you are better informed than I am.
We are what we eat. If there is any power in numbers can we please attempt to use it? If you agree with the principles I have attempted to set out in this piece, send it to your friends, they might think it is a movement!
I can’t guarantee that I am not a crank! I don’t think I am, but how can you tell? I am just a slightly knowledgeable, concerned grandfather watching with horror what we are doing to food and fearing for the children. I am not anonymous and you are perfectly free to contact me or check on my credentials. The only thing I would ask is that you do not swamp me with email, I am reasonably polite and it would pain me to have to ignore anyone!
(14 April 2001)
14 April 2001
I apologise for using such an unimaginative heading for this piece but it says exactly what is in my mind. I believe that there are millions of ordinary decent people who are suffering frustration because they feel unable to exert any control over what is happening in Britain today. The root of the problem, and the reason it is so hard to address, is that we seem to be observing a breakdown in competence, common sense and expert management in so many areas of our lives. I don't need to lay out a detailed list, we can all construct our own. The consequence of this comprehensive breakdown is that there are too many targets, our frustration is generated by the fact that we do not know where to begin, and what can an individual do anyway?
My personal frustration has reached a level where I feel I have to do something constructive and effective and after a lot of thought I have come to two conclusions, I have the best chance of success if my attempt to influence events is well-focussed and efficiently delivered. My target is one where I have personal experience and considerable knowledge, the food industries. My method of dissemination is the internet because I believe that by this method ‘ordinary’ people have the best chance of combining to make their beliefs heard.
Can I say here that I believe that the power of the ‘ordinary’ people lies in the fact that collectively, they are the repository of more knowledge and experience than all the government agencies put together. As such, they are the most likely source of any consensus of common sense and must try to make themselves heard. Please read the rest of this document, and if you agree with it in principle, mail it to your friends or to any destination where you think the fact that it exists might concentrate thinking. The power it generates will be by virtue of the extent to which it is spread. Size does matter!
First, I must briefly establish my credentials. My name is Stanley Graham, I am retired, I have a brain and a very varied working experience. As a general transport driver, a cattle wagon driver and a repairer of very large boilers I have had access to many industrial plants and centres which are crucial elements in the food chain. Because I was there as an essential part of the process, I was invisible, I had the opportunity to observe what was happening without hindrance. I admit that my experience goes back over 50 years and some of the malpractices I saw have now been overtaken by events but this doesn't damage my basic thesis which is that the food industry has a fatal flaw as far as the consumer is concerned. The prime objective of the companies concerned is to make profit. In an ethos of globalisation leading to increased competition the main casualty is the standard of ethics inside these industries.
Over a year ago I was so disturbed about food quality that I wrote several letters to people who I thought might be influenced and this resulted in a request for an article which was published in a well-respected UK publication, 'The Food Magazine'. This is the house journal of the food Commission, a totally independent non-profit making organisation which will not allow advertising, thus preserving its independence. Bearing in mind that this was published in Spring 2000, here is the article.
WASTE NOT WANT NOT?
I think I may have been very lucky in my choice of parents, we are a long living family with an extremely varied ancestry. However, when I reach 100 years old and they ask me what the secret of long life is I shall tell them that it was most probably down to spending thirty years of my working life as a trucker and industrial boiler repairer. It gave me some clues as to what foods to avoid!
Forty years ago I used to wonder why I was carting bone meal, hoof and horn meal, bagged broiler house muck and greaves into animal feed manufacturers. (‘Greaves’ is the trade name for knacker yard meat meal which has been partially cooked and left to start putrefying as this makes it easier to process.) I found out that they were all high in protein and were an economic way of improving the analysis of the end product, cattle cake, and allowing cheap bulking agents like chopped straw to be used as well. During a long spell as a cattle wagon driver I asked the bloke I worked for why he always bought ‘coarse ration’ instead of cattle cake as it was so expensive. He said it was better for the cattle and the reason it was so dear was because you could take a handful and see exactly what was in it, a handful of cake told you nothing. Thirty years on I realised that what I had been looking at was the genesis of BSE in cattle and new variant CJD in humans. The only reason it had been done was to raise profit margins.
During the fifties and sixties I saw many more examples of this sort of adulteration. Greaves were used regularly as raw material at fat refiners. Skin oil, which is extracted from hides when they are processed, went to margarine and toilet soap manufacturers. (Large posters on the wall at the skin yard proclaimed ‘BEWARE OF ANTHRAX!’) Lanolin was extracted from wool scouring plants and sewage works. It went to the manufacturers of toiletries, particularly hand creams and lipstick. Limestone flour which is very finely powdered limestone rock went into the large industrial bread bakeries to provide the added calcium. I carried all these things and drew some conclusions from my knowledge. You’ve guessed it, don’t eat margarine, render your own dripping and avoid anything with lanolin in it!
I began to realise that whilst simple economics was the root factor which drove these practices there was another element, the use of waste which would otherwise have been a negative cost because it would have to be disposed of in some way. What a brilliant business ploy, convert waste which was a financial liability, into a by-product that could be sold to enhance profits!
Another job I had and enjoyed for years was carrying cattle for a very good and caring cattle dealer. Our trade was in high quality rearing calves for the dairy industry to Scotland and the best scotch heifers back down to Northern England for sale to dairy farmers, many of whom sold milk direct to the public through their own retail rounds in the surrounding towns. They were on high profits, bought good beasts and looked after their business. I loved the cattle and in all the time I drove for this man never had a casualty except for one still-born calf. (I used to have to stop and calve a beast many a time as I was bringing them down the country.) However, there was a trade in the markets that we went to which used to puzzle me. Many calves, particularly bull calves, are not worth rearing. One name for these is ‘bobby calves’, another, more accurate description is ‘killers’. As soon as their navels were dry (if they were lucky) these calves were taken into the market and sold to specialised dealers. I asked what they were used for and was told that the manufacturers of baby and geriatric foods bought them to render down for gravy. I have to say that I never delivered any of these calves to their final destination but have no reason to believe that what I was told was untrue. Only a couple of months ago I visited the dealer I used to work for and he told me that the killer trade was still active and that nowadays the dealers wanted calves with a little more age on them because ‘the meat will have firmed up.’ This signals to me that they are going for human consumption.
Later in my career I was working for a firm which repaired large industrial boilers. Many people use the phrase ‘Steam Age’ as a pejorative term to describe something which is out-of-date or obsolete. Nothing could be further from the truth, many industrial processes still require steam and one of the major users is the food industry. When we went in to repair a boiler we were invisible, an essential part of the furniture so the business of the plant went on as though we weren’t there. Because of this, in the course of my work over the last ten years I have seen further examples of the miracle which is turning waste into profit.
I have worked on a plant where out-of-date cheese and butter was brought in from supermarkets. The cheese was processed and emerged as mozzarella for pizza toppings. The butter was combined with vegetable oil from EEC intervention stocks that was anywhere from ten to fifteen years old, no mistaking this, it was clearly labelled and dated. The resulting goo was processed, I think by hydrogenation, and emerged as ‘baker’s shortening’ with a shelf life of six months.
I saw small vans coming into the same factory and unloading and enquired about them. They were providing a useful service to restaurants and chip shops by collecting their used cooking oil for free disposal. Needless to say, this was not a charitable enterprise, I don’t know what was being done with it but I think I could hazard a good guess. I was talking to man who knows about these things a few weeks ago and he told me that the service wouldn’t be free for much longer as the trade had taken a knock when some entrepreneur in Europe had decided that his profit margin could be boosted by augmenting his vegetable oil with used transformer oil! The big problem with this is that apart from the fact that it was mineral oil he was introducing heavy metals into the mix. Evidently this ploy had been discovered and the result was a drop in profit in the industry due to better regulation.
Another class of plant we worked in were the ‘protein converters’. These are factories which take in abattoir and meat processor’s offal and convert the waste into ‘protein granules’. Look on the side of a tin of pet food and you will find that ‘protein granules’ or ‘meat by-products’ figures in the list of contents. What this really means is chicken heads, feet, feathers and guts and any other by-product you can imagine from an abattoir. These are not in prime condition when they arrive at the plant and you can imagine the smell. The miracle is that when you open the tin of pet food it smells good enough to eat!
I realise that some of my knowledge on this subject is forty years old by now and some things have changed, however the lesson I have drawn from these experiences is even fresher than the products of the ‘miracle factories’ as I call them. It is quite simply that some essential questions are not being asked in the debate on food safety.
Food processors, manufacturers, retailers and restaurants should be made to account for their waste. There should be a clear audit trail which allows verification of the means of disposal. This regulatory framework should be tight enough to ensure that sub-standard food is not allowed re-entry into the food chain whether it be human or animal.
It is blindingly obvious now that abattoir waste should never have been allowed entry to herbivorous animal feed, the cost has far exceeded any savings that were made at the time. My argument is that equally damaging practices are still current and that nobody can tell what the consequences will be. It is common sense that once food has deteriorated it should be destroyed and not re-processed.
I have a fear for the young of this country. Talk to any medical person and ask them about the unexplained rise in things like wheezing after exercise, asthma, glue ear and food poisoning. We have no clear answers as to what is causing these disabilities. Suppose it was connected with re-cycling waste food? I’m all right, I eat butter, eggs, good local meat, cook for myself and bake my own bread. I’ve lived a hard life with lots of physical exercise so there’s a good foundation to my body. What’s the outlook for the young with a worsening diet and lack of physical work? The least we can do for them is to make sure that they aren’t forced to eat crap just to satisfy some multi-national’s profit motive.
(Published in the Food Magazine, Spring issue, 2000)
Since I wrote this article we in the UK have seen further evidence of the damage which can be done by allowing waste to re-enter the food chain. There was a report of rotten and cancerous turkey meat being diverted from its destination as raw material for the pet food industry to supermarket shelves after trimming and washing in salt water. A court case followed and I think three of the low level participants received minor sentences. There is another case of this nature involving two and a half tons of condemned poultry in the courts at the moment.
We are currently suffering the worst outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in recorded history. It is generally accepted that the most likely point of entry of the infection was via the feeding of infected food waste to pigs in the NE of England. I have two points to make here. One is allowed to be wise before the event and why didn’t the pet owners object to the fact that rotten and cancerous food was being fed to their pets. (It is a sad commentary on our collective attitudes but I have to say that this aspect surprised me more than the lack of public reaction to the fact that waste was being sold as ‘fresh food’!) Why wasn't swill sterilisation supervised better by the local authority? I think I have made my point in respect of the simple proposition that food waste should be destroyed and not re-cycled into the human food chain. Thanks for taking the time to read this, I appreciate it.
What triggered me off to write this to you all? As I said in my introduction, one of the baffling aspects of all this is how to make the decision what to attack. What moved me to make another attempt on food waste was my rage and frustration at the incompetence of government agencies to maintain decent levels of compassion and care in their handling of the present F&M outbreak. Because of monumental incompetence on the part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, hundreds of thousands of sheep are at this moment lambing out in the open in fields which are virtually mud baths, the lambs can't be cared for and are dying like flies. In any normal circumstances, anyone treating animals in this fashion would be immediately prosecuted but it is being forced on individual farmers because of inflexible regulations and an inability to take responsibility and allow practical experience and common sense to dictate a solution.
This is what I alluded to in my introduction. There is a root cause to the problems in the food industry, the cruelty and lack of compassion towards our animals and the wider malaise which is affecting many other spheres of life in the UK. The nearest I can get to it at the moment is that it is incompetent management exacerbated by the over-arching tyranny of the profit motive. Apart from the direct disadvantages produced by this ethos which are affecting both animals and humans, the very fact that it is occurring is the strongest criticism of the system. If proper cost-benefit analysis was applied to all these cases I suspect it could be proved that practices leading to short term gain by individual companies have resulted in long term penalties of immense proportions. Contrast the gains from feeding animal waste to herbivores with the costs of BSE. The alleged rogue ham sandwich fed to the pig in the NE of England that led to our current outbreak of F&M because regulations controlling sterilisation of swill weren't properly enforced.
One last, and very pessimistic word, I have a terrible suspicion that what we are looking at is the tip of a very large iceberg. Why are so many of our children suffering from glue ear, wheezing after exercise and asthma? Make up your own list, you are better informed than I am.
We are what we eat. If there is any power in numbers can we please attempt to use it? If you agree with the principles I have attempted to set out in this piece, send it to your friends, they might think it is a movement!
I can’t guarantee that I am not a crank! I don’t think I am, but how can you tell? I am just a slightly knowledgeable, concerned grandfather watching with horror what we are doing to food and fearing for the children. I am not anonymous and you are perfectly free to contact me or check on my credentials. The only thing I would ask is that you do not swamp me with email, I am reasonably polite and it would pain me to have to ignore anyone!
(14 April 2001)