http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-38618700

With the amount of food scares in recent years, I can't help but wonder if the race to profit is partially to blame for all the food allergies people now seem to get.

People want cheap food, the industry delivers, that's where mad cow and hormone chicken started

In general you're correct, the drive to reduce production costs means corners sometimes get cut too far. But I'm not sure it's the customers that are primarily driving it in the first place.

Realistically, as a customer, do you stand in Sainsbury's or wherever and say 'My God, 68p for a bottle of milk, if it was 65p somewhere else, I'd shop there instead.' Probably not. You would notice if your weekly shop suddenly got much cheaper or much more expensive in total but I'd suggest you'd find it's roughly the same wherever you shop (unless it's Harrods).

Supermarkets are pressuring producers to make the goods as cheaply as possible not only because there's customer pressure to do so, but because a) that guarantees the supermarket's profits while allowing them to lower on the shelf prices thus b) they can use loss leaders and advertise lower single items prices to get shoppers to come to them instead of some others. Even though most likely the total weekly cost of food to any particular customer won't change that much at all.

Everyone likes a bargain, fair enough. But pressure on producers to cut corners is as much about share price and whatever their next ad campaign is about as it is actual customer demand.

The problem is, most people expect to eat meat nearly every day of the week. When I was younger, we had meat 4 or 5 times a week, with "proper" meat on Sundays. During the week, it would often be mutton or hearts. How often do people really eat those these days?

My wife came from a poorer family and they ate meat maybe twice a week. She can't understand that I think it is normal to eat some kind of meat nearly every day.

And with the move to eating so much meat, the amount that has to be produced has increased, plus with the population explosion over the recent decades, you just can't produce enough meat using traditional or "normal" methods. Pigs generally never see the light of day, and because of the smell they generate, they live in huge buildings with tall chimneys that try and pump out the used air cleaner and higher.

In the production (slaughter), we have moved from maybe 2 dozen people handling a single animal to maybe half a dozen. Everything that can be automated has been automated - this should lead to cleaner animals, with less room for contamination, because not as many people need to touch them - in the past, people would manually sort the carcasses into the cool-house, having to manually shift them from one lane to another. Now it is all computer controlled.

When you look at one of my ex-customers, Pini Polonia, they processed over 1,000 pigs an hour on a single slaughter line. With the required rest times before slaughter, that meant that there was usually a 20KM queue of transporters lining up to deliver animals in the morning (first deliveries around 1am). With that sort of speed, if something happens, there is a lot of meat passing through the system, before it can be caught.

Then you have the discounters, like Aldi and Lidl. They are especially bad, because they set the prices - they tell the suppliers, deliver at this price or go to hell. As they are among the largest providers of meat, they have the power to push the prices down and they, and the supermarkets, are competing against each other.

I know of several cases, where one of the discounters, like Aldi, have gone to a farmer and offered them a lucrative contract. They take so much produce, that the farmer has to gear up production and invest heavily in new machinery - and usually they have to cancel smaller contracts to local customers - only to have the discounter turn around after the 1 or 2 year contract and halve the price they pay. The farmer can't afford to cancel the contract, he is producing too much to go else where nobody can take all of their produce and the discounter will only take the set production yield - if the farmer doesn't meet the quantities and quality, they pay penalties; so they have no real choice but to continue providing at those cut prices, which often means selling at a loss or barely break-even. Many file for bankruptcy.

The problem often isn't about share price and making profit, at least for the producers, it is about not having to file for bankruptcy. The problem is the supermarkets and discounters and the unrealistic expectations they have pushed on consumers over the last 3 decades or so.

Very true which is why I buy most of my meat from my local butchers who buys from local farms

Yes its more expensive but it is better quality

+1, if you're lucky enough to still have a decent local butcher, anyway.

These days pretty much the only things I buy from super market are 'non perishables'. Toilet rolls, washing powder, stuff like that. I buy the odd tin of stuff maybe but otherwise everything is from local shops.

Which I am - its (actallu its the next village) is a posh area so the locals can afford to pay extra from a good Butcher, Baker (no candle stick maker ) and grocers