Frozen Meat Trade

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 58, 3 November 1892, Page 2

Frozen Meat Trade

Mr F. W. Venn, a very old resident of Palmerston North, who has just returned from a trip to the Old Country, supplies the Standard with the following :— The point Mr Venn waxes most indignant and most eloquent on is the disgraceful way the frozen meat trade is carried on at Home. He refers strongly to the deliberate swindles perpetrated on our mutton by the sale of puny ill-fed carcases brought from the Kiver Plate, as New Zealand mutton. He very nearly got a couple of black eyes from the indignant butchers he accused of palming such stuff off as genuine New Zealand mutton. " In one place," says Mr Venn, " I noticed ! what looked at a distance like pair of stays hanging up outside the butcher's, but on closer examination I took it to be venison by its dark color. In reply to my query as to what it was, the man called it New Zealand mutton. I soon gave him to understand he was not talking to a new chum, and that in the course of my 27 years in the colony I had never seen anything to come within eoo-ey of the rubbish exposed for sale. Eventually the man admitted that per* haps I was right, but he had purchased it tor New Zealand mutton." Many of Mr Venn's friends were incredulous as to the good quality of our mutton, and when he took them to Newgate market and got the salesmen to point out the real article, they were astonished at its good quality. Only once in the course of his trip, did Mr Venn come across a man who called his frozen mutton any* thing except " New Zealand," and yet hundreds of thousands of South American and Australian carcases were sold by the butchers. When properly thawed and taken care of, New Zealand mutton has a superior appearance even to the English, and is sold as such, but a lot j of the frozen meat imported and retailed at 8d lb would not find a purchaser out here at any price. Mr Venn is convinced satisfaction will never be given until New Zealand has her own retail shops at Home.