Marking of Foreign Meat

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 28, 2 August 1893, Page 2

Marking of Foreign Meat

(London Times, Jane 10.) The Select Committee of the House of Lords upon the marking of foreign meat sat again yesterday, Lord Onslow, the chairman, presiding. Major J. Stackpool, of the Army Service Corps, Deputy - Assistant Adjutant General and Inspector of Rations under the War Office, said that for four years he had acted in the latter capacity. At the beginning of that period frozen beef and refrigerated beef were supplied to the troops during nine months of the year, but after twelve months' trial the frozen beef was given up, because the freezing process caused it to deteriorate in quality. Refrigerated beef arrived in England practically unchanged, and was in every respect similar to Home killed beef kept in a refrigerator. At first there was a great prejudice in the army against refrigerated beef, but this had disappeared, and the men had grown to understand how nutritious and tasteful it was. Officers who were formerly dead against it now asked to be supplied with it. The system of cooking in the army had improved so much of late years that some officers of the Erench Army had been sent over to study it. New Zealand frozen mutton was supplied one day each week. It was excellent, and when properly cooked in every way equal to Welsh mutton. The average price paid for the beef and mutton was s£d a pound, and the very primest meat, both Home and foreign, could be sold in large quantities at that price ; 40 per cent of the meat supplied to the troops was Home killed, and four years at>o he had found bull beef and old cow at 69 per cent of the stations, and his last half-yearly report showed only 8 per cent. West End butchers bought the refrigerated meat at 4£d a pound and sold it as English at Is 2d. Bull beef and old cow, which the butchers ought to be able to sell at 2d a pound, was largely disposed of to the poor, who never got refrigerated beef. Sir Somers Vine (assistant secretary, Imperial Institute) gave evidence as to the excellence of colonial mutton and the avidity with which the workmen at the Institute bought it. He believed the cookery schools of the County Council would do much to popularise colonial meat.