Cheap meat Cheap meat Cheap meat is a term used to describe relatively inexpensive meat (e.g. fatty cuts of lamb or mutton) or to indicate that the consumer price of meat does not include the overall costs of industrial meat production. The term cheap meat is then either related to subsidies, to hidden costs or to non-material costs ("moral cost") of meat production. Non-material costs can be related to issues such as animal welfare (e.g. treatment of animals, over-breeding). The term is used by critics of the meat industry. The meat industry is subsidized with billions of dollars by governments who support
2013 horse meat scandal in the UK, France and Sweden and the shepherd's pie and moussaka ranges in France contained horse meat without proper declaration or official scrutiny . The contamination may have gone on since summer 2012 according to a leaked document. Compass Group was the world's biggest catering firm at the time and discovered through conducting tests that it was unknowingly supplying concealed horse meat in food products to a "small number" of schools in Northern Ireland. Whitbread, which was at the time Britain's biggest hotel group also discovered through tests that it had unknowingly sold concealed horse meat in food products.