U.S. rejects Katrina meals, offers them to others

:wtf:

They want to make sure that all supplies are purchased from one of their many 'family businesses'...

I read what was in the those British MREs. Frankly, mm, maybe it's just as well we send them to Pakistan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4221838.stm

I was raised on bad British cooking, so the words "chicken pate, fruit dumplings in sauce, bacon and beans..." just make me want to heave.

Each ration comprises Breakfast, Main meal, dessert, snack, and a beverage/accessories pack.

Accessories pack: Wrapped in a transparent plastic bag, sealed with adhesive tape (like sellotape)

2 x Coffee sachets (5g)
6 x Tea bags
6 x Non-dairy whitner sachets
6 x Sachets quick dissolving white sugar (25g)
1 x Beef stock drink sachet (5g)
2 x Powdered fruit drink sachets
2 x Powdered soup drink sachets
1 x Pack Wrigley's PK chewing gum (4 pieces)
1 x Small folding tin opener (in GS ration packs only)
5 x weather-proof matches ('lifeboat matches') plus striker, in a small plastic zip-lok bag
1 x Pack Rolled Oats Mix (dehydrated porridge)
1 x Pack chocolate drink mix (to make 1 pint)
1 x Pack Dextrose glucose tablets (orange flavour was common)
1 x Bar of chocolate. Catering bars of Yorkie, Mars, or Rolo's were most common. Yorkies were preferred by my unit - they didn't melt as much as the others!
6-8 x Sheets double-ply gov't issue toilet tissue (smooth one side, like sandpaper the other. Called slide'n'hide sheets by the troops)
1 x Pack Biscuits, fruit filled (fortified malted garibaldis)
2 x Packs Biscuits, Brown, AB (solid - VERY solid - 'digestives')
1-2 x Packs for the AB biscuits, normally of long-life pate, cheese (one big foil-sealed pack), or fruit spread. The cheese was called 'Cheese Possessed' by the troops)
1 x Menu sheet. In English and French

Boil-in-the-bag packs:

1 x Breakfast pack, such as Bacon & Baked Beans, or some such. Remarkably, they tended to actually tasted as in the description on the packaging.
1 x Main Meal (normally taken in the evening, prior to dusk, if cooked). Something like Pasta, Chicken & Mushroom in white sauce, or Lancashire hotpot, were main meals. I preferred Beef stew. It tasted better.
1 x Dessert pack. Pears in syrup, mixed fruit pudding in butterscotch sauce, or something as plain as milk rice pudding. They all tended to taste good!

What a statement!
This country sucks.

so what's that say about our "cousins across the pond"?

Who cares if you eat British beef if you can't eat anything else? The risk is worth the end result. Anyway, better British beef than a McDonald's hamburger.

if the food is unacceptable for import, it's unacceptable for import. If the Bushistas let it in, would you cry foul then for their disregard of health warnings (health warnings you yourself now advocate ignoring)?

I'd have thought they merely slipped up, since the Bush regime is incapable of an act of mercy. Bush saw fit to suspend "minimum wage" protections to give his buddies cheap labor. I would think they could look the other way to feed poor people...well, a human being would, which excludes Bush.

"minimum wage" and whatever other bullshit you feel the need to drag into it. . . your hatred overrides reason and precludes anything but itself.

My "hatred" doesn't exist anywhere but in your head. I've no idea to whom you think you're writing. I'm merely participating in an adult conversation, but you seem unable to be disagreed with without becoming disagreeable.

I don't waste my time with people who react emotionally to simple matters of fact.

This is yet another episode of George Bush failing the people of this country.

have anything to do with the Agriculture Department's rejection of potentially tainted food.

Both entail overruling prevailing policy for a more important (to somebody) end. The minimum wage law (which the bastard should have let stand) he rescinded for cheap labor for his buddies. He let the beef ban viz-a-viz the MRE's remain, because he didn't give a damn about the poor.

These British MRE retail at £9.99 (about $17) so whatever the UK government is 'foisting' on the US is not exactly cheap.

http://www.surplusandoutdoors.com/ishop/877/shopscr409.html

As the ration packs last for some years without perishing why does the US government simply give them back to Britain.

they remain unwanted in this country and should have never been sent.

I agree with you. though. These MREs should be returned to Britain rather than distributed elsewhere. Or the British should get to choose the destination and the US then ship them there.

But more than the British MREs, what's with the rejection without cause of an additional 33,000 MREs from Germany, Russia, Spain and France? The British offers should be rejected -- there are laws against importation of British beef -- but why the other countries? Here it seems more in line with propping up American agribusiness than it does concern for American health.

... which should have been rescinded in line with the rest of the world, years ago. But, hell, who wants to allow the safest beef products in the world into the country, when the continuation of what is now a spurious ban allows the US to get away with what is tantamount to a trade embargo by any other name?

The packages were neither foisted nor are they likely to give anyone anything but a fuller stomach.

These are the rations given, sorry, "foisted" onto British servicemen. And yup of course, every single one of them is as mad as your proverbial break-dancing cow.

This ingratitude, and some of the responses I've seen to it, is jaw-droppingly stunning. This combined with the fact that the food is seen as "not good enough for our victims, but hell, I'm sure there's some gook or towel-head nation out there that want our cast-offs".

That attitude speaks volumes about the American view of the world.

... that we care about the plight of the victims of hurricane katrina. And also that we will send MREs that contain British Beef, which is actually about now about the safest in the world to consume - directly due to the unbelievably rigid restrictions and guidelines in place for beef production in the UK following the BSE outbreak.

Either that, or every single British citizen will die long before their time doing the naked tango and wearing a kermit the frog suit.

Get real for heaven's sake.

The country is fine. We're the ones who hate him.

"No thanks, we have plenty of mad cow of our own", says Bush.

it's a wonder we have a friend left in the world. Or do we?????

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you !!! After the Karen Hughes tour, it is inconceivable that anyone thinks of the mis-administration as anything but culturally tone deaf.

I suppose the Israelis may still like us...

We COULD send the MREs to India, and send SPAM to Pakistan. That would make it a complete cluster fuck, worthy of this clueless administration.

...I like the MRE's going to India though !!!

... at all to the current administration if it has a friend anywhere in the world but in their bank-rolling corporations?

and an unnecessary hardship on people who went without food after Katrina.

I find it very, very hard to believe that mad cow disease isn't in the United States--I would eat beef from Britain, where they acknowledge the existence of mad cow disease in the system and have taken steps to prevent further transmission, long before I ate beef from a country that's in denial about the problem.

That's just tacky.

Even if it's tacky, the thought of Pakistanis and Kashmiris getting wholesome nourishment will make me feel OK about the tackiness.

Thanks for trying to help here. It does mean much to many and we are completely outraged over this.

:hi: :shrug: :hug:

about your government's on-going determination to let their poor and/or poor black citizens to be flooded out, drowned, unburied, displaced, bereaved, disenfranchised, destitute AND ON TOP OF IT ALL deprived of PERFECTLY GOOD free food donated by America's so-called strongest ally. I promise you, the chance of contracting CJD from beef is the smallest of your worries, if you have just lost everything, and nowadays it is a very very small risk anyway. These were not meals deliberately created by the British to kill off whoever ate them. But that is how the American "system" has treated them. FFS, why accept the gift and then not use it? Dog-in-the-manger does not come near describing this scandal.

You would see that I thought this action was ludicrous. However, you said the "Americans were too grand" (or words to that effect), when the Americans hadn't made any determination at all... they were the ones dying in the water. Bush and his criminal cabal made this determination. It shouldn't surprise you. If they EVER did a humane and/or rational thing, it would shock hell out of 54% of us in the US.

I have to repeat my contention that if I were to meet DUH-bya, I'd probably spend the rest of my life in GITMO!! :mad:

and if poor Americans who have lost homes and livelihoods are not allowed by their government to eat them, then I am sure that the even poorer Pakistanis and Kashmiris will be only too glad to have them.

If there is a God, then in the next world, Bush and co will spend eternity starving - they will DREAM of being so fortunate as to eat British MREs.

so they may not all be suitable for a Muslim region. The British army could use them though, and any money off the defence budget could be added to the aid sent to Kashmir.

a day after we saw the damage done by katrina, i was moved to do something...anything really, to help out(seeing as i am unemployed and have lots of free time), so i went down to the local red cross, signed up as a volunteer and offered to donate blood after i had filled out all the paperwork. towards the end of the questionnaire they ask you prior to getting stuck, i was asked if i had visited the UK since 1985. having spent around a combined 4 months in Scotland during the late 80's/early 90's for my submarines normal refits, i answered yes...well, thats where it ended...i wasn't allowed to give blood due to the potential risk of being infected with mad cow diesese...i told the red cross worker i had never eaten any beef, just haggis(sheep's innards) and fish locally, and that our meats were shipped over from the US...still no go. i am now on a worldwide list of people who may have been exposed....wonderful.....

Why not just say thank you, and put them in a warehouse somewhere.and later ship the to Iraq for the British soldiers over there:shrug:

LOL!

Considering the fact that testing here is a scientific joke- and the very same practices that were banned in Britain years ago still go on here I just have to laugh.

Anyone who eats beef (especially American ground beef) is playing roulette with their health- not to mention contributing to the most envirnmentally destructive industry on the planet...

ASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Friday offered needy countries more than 330,000 packaged meals donated by Britain to feed Hurricane Katrina victims but rejected due to a U.S. ban on British beef.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the "Meals Ready to Eat," or MREs, had been held in a warehouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, for more than a month after U.S. Agriculture Department officials said they could not be distributed in the United States because they contained British beef products.
http://newsbox.msn.co.uk/article.aspx?as=adimarticle&ae=windows-1252&f=uk_-_olgbtopnews&t=4023&id=1425322&d=20051015&do=http://newsbox.msn.co.uk&i=http://newsbox.msn.co.uk/mediaexportlive&ks=0&mc=5&ml=ma&lc=en

policy on U.S. beef inspection (or non-inspection as the case may be), I find this totally ridiculous. But what else is new?

of Katrina, but OK for other needy countries.

Apparently Katrina victims were slow in receiving aid from FEMA, which makes them needed, as far I am concerned.

Mad Cow Disease was the fear? So why pass it to other countries? Destroy the food if it is dangerous!!!!

Where is the logic? Please explain.

The act of giving what they suspect to be poisoned food to the needy is ever so suited to our administration.

Caswell and Sparling (in press) emphasize the importance of an internationally coordinated response to managing risks from diseases such as BSE, and Caswell (in press) argues that the potential trade impacts of BSE discovery were not sufficiently weighted in the BSE risk management process. Thus, if MRR legislation had been enacted prior to the recent discoveries of BSE outside of Europe, we may never have banned imports of Japanese beef when they discovered their first case in September 2001, nor vice versa. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to point out what might have been. Nevertheless, both Canada and the United States had been warned by the European Union in July 2000 that they were at risk for discovering the disease (Scientific Steering Committee, 2000).

In 2003, the USDA tested approximately 20,000 cattle for BSE. Countries in which the disease is established have more intensive surveillance—for example, the EU has tested around 8 million head per year since 2001 (Fox & Peterson, 2004).

Full article: http://www.choicesmagazine.org/2005-2/safety/2005-2-03.htm

It makes for moderately interesting reading. Take a good look at the tables - Who's taking a risk with which nation's health?

:shrug:

The Over Thirty Months (OTM) Rule is the BSE control set up in 1996 that automatically bans older cattle from entering the human food chain. It is one of the two main food safety controls in relation to BSE we operate in the UK – the other being Specified Risk Material (SRM) controls.

On 1 December 2004 Ministers announced the start of a managed transition towards the lifting of the OTM Rule following advice from the Food Standards Agency that the current control measures are no longer proportionate to the risk.

On 15 August 2005 the Agency’s Board agreed to advise Ministers that an effective system to test OTM cattle for BSE before they enter the food chain has now been developed. Ministers will decide the next steps.

On 15 September 2005, the Government announced that it is to replace the Over Thirty Months (OTM) Rule with BSE testing, Ministers also agreed to a number of pre-conditions set by the Food Standards Agency to ensure continued consumer protection during implementation.

The primary BSE control, the removal of Specified Risk Material (SRM), which removes more than 99% of any infectivity that may be present, will remain in place.

Full article: http://www.food.gov.uk/foodindustry/meat/otmreview/

These (and scads of other material available) are just the tip of the iceberg as to why the US govt response to the aid-gift from the UK is so bloody offensive...