This is why all jugs and containers in kitchens and food service areas should be color-coded.

One-year-olds Daniel Martin and Sophie Watkinson were rushed to hospital with injuries to mouth and throat after their sippy cups were filled from unmarked jug containing pipe cleaning fluid instead of water at a Toby’s Carvery on Ecclesall Road South, Sheffield.

“When Daniel began to cough we were encouraging him to sip more water, which was obviously just making it worse,” said Mrs Martin, from Bury.

“At the same time, Stuart and myself took the lids off the children’s cups. I put it to my mouth and immediately it smelt like bleach.

“The barmaid came and said: ‘I’m really sorry, we’ve used the pipe fluid.’ I didn’t believe her at first.

“The manager called the ambulance and gave us a bottle of the cleaner to show us and to show to the doctors.”

Kathryn Baines, a public liability solicitor at Irwin Mitchell, said, “It beggars belief that this hazardous liquid was, as we understand it, left in a water jug without any warning or hazard signs to identify it.”

The restaurant chain, owned by leisure group Mitchells and Butlers, said staff have been retrained in cleaning practices following the incident in May.

A spokesman said, “We can confirm Toby Carvery has admitted liability and are currently in correspondence with Mr and Mrs Martin’s solicitors. The safety and well-being of our customers is our primary concern.”

Fidel Gomez — initially dubbed "Mr. Cheese" by state regulators — was issued a citation and ordered to pay a $500 fine for violating the Utah Dairy Act for producing and selling homemade queso fresco that was the source of an outbreak of Salmonella Newport in Utah going back to 2009.

Reports have placed the number of confirmed cases between 40 and 80, but have said the unreported cases may be in the thousands.

The news release states that Gomez was producing the cheese in his West Valley City home without the proper sanitation equipment or a license or permit. At least one Salt Lake Valley restaurant, in turn, was selling the cheese.

The cheese probe took three years, involved a criminal investigator and extended to a fast-food franchise where Mr. Cheese’s wife worked.

Associated Press reported yesterday that horses could soon be slaughtered in the U.S. for human consumption after Congress quietly lifted a 5-year-old ban on funding horse meat inspections, and activists say slaughterhouses could be up and running in as little as a month.

Today, Taiwanese animation house NMA released one of their signature videos to address the situation.

Grub Street New York says things to watch for in the video are “the horse that gets zapped into a pile of money (we're pretty sure that's not how the slaughter actually happens) and the bloody Seabiscuit saddle at the French dinner table.”

I appreciated the Canadian slaughterhouse worker in a hockey jersey prodding a horse with a hockey stick.

Some background on the horse slaughter debate from AP; Australia also has two horse slaughterhouses.

Slaughter opponents pushed a measure cutting off funding for horse meat inspections through Congress in 2006 after other efforts to pass outright bans on horse slaughter failed in previous years. Congress lifted the ban in a spending bill President Barack Obama signed into law Nov. 18 to keep the government afloat until mid-December.

It did not, however, allocate any new money to pay for horse meat inspections, which opponents claim could cost taxpayers $3 million to $5 million a year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have to find the money in its existing budget, which is expected to see more cuts this year as Congress and the White House aim to trim federal spending.

The USDA issued a statement Tuesday saying there are no slaughterhouses in the U.S. that butcher horses for human consumption now, but if one were to open, it would conduct inspections to make sure federal laws were being followed.

Pro-slaughter activists say the ban had unintended consequences, including an increase in neglect and the abandonment of horses, and that they are scrambling to get a plant going - possibly in Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska or Missouri.

Sue Wallis, a Wyoming state lawmaker who's the group's vice president, said ranchers used to be able to sell horses that were too old or unfit for work to slaughterhouses but now they have to ship them to butchers in Canada and Mexico, where they fetch less than half the price.

The federal ban devastated "an entire sector of animal agriculture for purely sentimental and romantic notions," she said.

Although there are reports of Americans dining on horse meat a recently as the 1940s, the practice is virtually non-existent in this country, where the animals are treated as beloved pets and iconic symbols of the West.

A federal report issued in June found that local animal welfare organizations reported a spike in investigations for horse neglect and abandonment since 2007. In Colorado, for example, data showed that investigations for horse neglect and abuse increased more than 60 percent - from 975 in 2005 to almost 1,600 in 2009.

The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office also determined that about 138,000 horses were transported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter in 2010, nearly the same number that were killed in the U.S. before the ban took effect in 2007. The U.S. has an estimated 9 million horses.