Recently, we've all been hearing about beef products in supermarkets containing horse meat, up to 100% in some cases. Many people are disgusted by it, and rightly so- when we spend our money on beef, or any other food for that matter, we expect it to be just that! However, some say that if you're eating a cow, there's nothing wrong with eating a horse. I interviewed some people to find out what they thought. Here's what they said:

"I think its a horrible thing to lie to customers like that."

"I think that there isn't a problem with the meats, more with the trust I have placed in supermarkets,  however I think the media have hyped up the scandal too much."

So really, the problem doesn't seem to lie with the meat itself, more with the breach of trust between the consumer and the supermarket. Which is understandable, if they can shamelessly label one meat as another, what else are they doing?

The media and many other people are citing a health risk as a reason for their outrage, but what are the health risks?

Here are the NHS guidelines on the subject

"On February 14 the Food Standards Agency (FSA) released a statement that it had detected the presence of phenylbutazone (bute) in horses slaughtered in the UK.
They tested a total of 206 horse carcasses between January 30 and February 7 2013. Of these, eight tested positive for the drug."

"Phenylbutazone has had its use as a drug for humans limited to very specific cases. When it was more widely used to treat people it was found that about one in 30,000 people suffered a serious side effect."

"If the horses were given the drug, phenylbutazone is only likely to be present in the contaminated meat products in very low concentrations. These levels are likely to be much lower than those previously used to treat humans. This suggests that any risk to health is likely to be very low."

A doctor I asked had this comment on the results:

"The public hasn't forgotten the "Mad Cow Disease" debacle and are unlikely to trust the public health professionals telling them that the risk is low."

So, really, it seems that the horsemeat is not really putting us at risk, the problem is, it has had a detrimental effect on our trust of the supermarkets, even worse considering this is not the first time, this happened before with BSE, and that is something that the supermarkets can't change.