The issue for me isn't so much the mix of meat in the products (although if I want beef or lamb or whatever clearly i should be able to rely 100% on the product being what it says on its particular tin). No, the sale of any meat from places like Tesco carries with it an implicit guarantee that, whatever meat it is, they
know where it has come from, what it is, how it was produced, and are happy it conforms to all applicable standards.
Thus the problem with unexpectedly finding a different ingredient isn't what that ingredient is, it's the obvious point that as it shouldn't be there, by definition Tesco are buying meat products where unbeknownst to them they suddenly cannot, at all, rely on anything the supplier says about the safety of their meat. Because somewhere along the line, somebody is
making money by chucking horse into the mix (and would of course not be doing it for any other reason - as has been pointed out, properly produced horsemeat is not cheap).
The clear implication is that padding out with horsemeat made somebody money, because the horsemeat they used was nearer "unfit for human consumption" standard than French gourmet standard. Maybe someone, just for instance, nicked a container load destined for the dogfood factory.
So It's not that it's horse. That is an issue, but safety is the big thing, and type of meat is very secondary. It's that they've no idea what state that meat was in.
