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Before there was horse meat in our burgers, there was Maggot Pete, perhaps one of the most notorious meat fraudsters in recent UK history. Peter Roberts was a businessman whose first enterprise was a maggot farm, where he earned his unfortunate nickname. In search of bigger profits, Roberts opened a poultry slaughterhouse, Denby Poultry Products, located in Derbyshire, England. He began using the waste products from his slaughterhouse legally in processed pet food to increase the profitability of his business. But he recognised an even more lucrative business opportunity: redirecting waste products back into the human food market. As well as collecting low-risk waste – animals not fit for human consumption, mostly for aesthetic reasons – Roberts began purchasing diseased and contaminated poultry from slaughterhouses. Some of these animals had died of unknown causes and could be carrying transmissible diseases. The slaughterhouses had been paying about £80 (US$126) per tonne to have these high-risk waste products taken away and destroyed, so when Roberts started offering £25 (US$39) per tonne to relieve them of the waste, it was an easy decision. Workers in Roberts’s factory would then trim away the undesirable parts, wash the chicken with bleach to remove slimy layers and discolouring, and finally package it up for sale to hospitals, schools, restaurants and leading supermarkets.
Between 1995 and 2001, Roberts and his team turned just under half a million kilos (over one million pounds) of condemned poultry out into the human food supply and built up a client base of around 600 customers. The operation earned the ringleaders a combined estimated total of £1 million (US$1.5 million) over the six years.
In 2000, an anonymous tip led environmental health officers in Derbyshire to begin investigating Denby Poultry Products. By 2001, they had enough evidence to raid the premises, where they found skips filled with green decaying poultry and a large pool of raw sewage in the middle of the processing plant. The investigation lasted over two years and involved more than 100 police officers and 50 local authority environmental health officers. The investigators unravelled the threads that connected Denby Poultry Products to over 1,000 other food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers around the country. They found fraudulent European health stamps, used to trace animal origin food products in the EU, which had been used to stamp the condemned chicken. Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Kwik Save and others began to recall potentially contaminated products – a process that cost the industry about £1 million (US$1.5m).
Six people were convicted in 2003. In addition to Roberts, two former managers and an occasional worker at Denby Poultry were given jail sentences, as well as two people that worked at MK Poultry, which is a food processor in Northampton that supplied the meat to retailers and added the European health stamp. Roberts was sentenced to six years in prison, but fled the country before the trial was over.
In 2007, Maggot Pete was found soaking up the sun in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which conveniently has no extradition treaty with the UK. Perhaps the £435,183 (US$686,923) he had personally made on the scam hadn’t quite been enough to sustain the family lifestyle, or perhaps his wife, Shari Roberts, just needed to get out of the house, but whatever the reason, Mrs Roberts was found working in the local estate agent. It was ultimately through her that Roberts was found. Despite the lack of an extradition treaty, Roberts arrived at Stansted airport within a month of being found, and shortly thereafter he appeared at Derby Crown Court, where he received his sentence. As well as his six-year term, Roberts was ordered to pay back more than £167,000 (US$263,600), which was the estimated amount left from his profits.
Roberts certainly wasn’t the first to see this opportunity for repurposing meat. Other operations even bigger than Maggot Pete’s have come before and since, but whether it was due to his catchy nickname or his flight to Cyprus, Roberts’ scam became one of the more notorious. In 1995, about the same time Roberts was starting his operation, Rotherham Council began investigating a secret operation at Wells By-Products factory in Darlton, Nottinghamshire. The Darlton gang were using the same business plan: to turn condemned poultry destined for pet food back out into the human food supply. In a three-year period, they sold more than one million kilos (over two million pounds) of rotten chicken and turkey to retailers and distributors across the UK. Those involved made about £2 million in profit (over US$3 million), while the investigation cost Rotherham Council half a million.
Fresh meat is highly regulated, but there was a loophole at the time that made these crimes possible: poultry was not included in the regulations that require condemned meat to be stained with an indelible dye to prevent it from finding its way back into the food chain. In 2001, following these scandals, the FSA started a public consultation to tighten up the regulations, including a proposal to stain high-risk and low-risk poultry by-products. By-products are considered to be high risk if there’s a chance they’re carrying transmissible diseases (such as BSE) or contain residues of prohibited substances (such as pesticides) or environmental contaminants (such as PCBs). These are classified as Category 1 animal by-products and are incinerated or sent to landfill after heat treatment. Category 2 by-products are also high risk and include animals rejected from abattoirs owing to their having infectious disease, or animals containing residues from legal treatments (such as antibiotics). These materials can be recycled for non-feed purposes such as oleochemical products (chemicals derived from animal fats). Low-risk by-products include those that are past being fit for human consumption or have been withdrawn from the market for reasons other than food safety concerns. These can get recycled into animal feed by licensed Category 3 processors. While many applauded the proposal to mark these by-products, poultry processors protested that these changes targeted legitimate British poultry processors that already had rigorous hygiene enforcement. Compulsory staining would increase their costs by as much as £30–£60 (US$47–$95) per tonne, depending on how much labour was required to prepare the by-product for staining. A carcass, for example, would require many deep incisions to ensure the stain penetrated the muscle. The cost of staining high-risk by-products for a typical large processing plant that’s moving over 41 million birds through its premises annually would be about £46,560 (US$73,372) a year. This cost would increase to £832,980 (US$1,312,737) per year if both high-risk and low-risk waste staining requirements were in place.1 The industry was concerned that these additional costs would lead to higher-priced British poultry being outcompeted by cheaper imports.
In 2002, regulations were introduced that require high-risk poultry by-products to be stained with a blue dye. Lewis Coates, the environmental health officer who led the team investigating the dubious processing in Darlton, suggested in an interview with the BBC that these regulations are still insufficient. What happened in Rotherham would still have happened under the new regulations: ‘It wouldn’t have made a difference; the meat would still have come through.’2 Low-risk products, which are used in pet food, aren’t covered by the legislation and therefore don’t require staining. The separation of the waste into various categories of risk is up to the processors, and while inspectors are responsible for checking the waste as well, there is little time to do so.
Luckily, neither of these poultry scams resulted in anyone becoming ill – despite some of this meat being sold on to institutions caring for some of the most vulnerable people in society, namely hospitals and schools. One can’t help but think that had a few people become ill as a direct result of these scams, the offenders might have received tougher penalties.
A rotten history
If we go back to the mid-nineteenth century, the sale of putrid meat was a weekly event. In Britain, shops weren’t allowed to sell anything on a Sunday and all shops had to close by midnight on Saturday. Therefore, anything that wasn’t going to keep until Monday was sold off at a discounted price. Saturday afternoon was also when many workmen received their weekly wages. The marrying of cheap food and money in the pocket resulted in the Saturday-night shopping phenomenon, where the working class would do their buying between 10 p.m. and midnight, when their money went a lot further. Shopping by candlelight also meant that the merchants could get away with things they couldn’t have during the light of day. A layer of fresh fat would be added to rotting meat to make it appear fresh. The meat the working class was buying on Saturday night was already past its ‘use by’ date before they bought it, let alone got it home and cooked it for the Sunday roast. But having paid for it, people felt obliged to cook it anyway, hoping for the best. There were meat inspectors on the hunt for tainted meat in these Saturday-night markets – in fact, it was one of the few types of food being policed at the time. The inspectors would hand out fines and confiscate tainted products. They would take diseased animals from the markets and hand them to the police for destruction – sometimes quite publicly. Yet, despite their efforts, the sale of rancid meat continued. Poor people were looking for cheap meat; they knew the deals were too good to be true, but it was all they could afford, and sellers were looking to offload products that were past their prime. Criminals and victims were in some sort of odd unspoken collaboration.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the release of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle awakened Americans to the state of their meat processing. Sinclair’s intention had been to draw the nation’s attention to the exploitation of US immigrants through the eyes of his main character, Jurgis, a Lithuanian man living and working in the stockyards of Chicago. However, it was the grotesque conditions in which meat was being processed that truly revolted the nation. Sinclair’s evocative descriptions of mouldy white sausages, piles of meat covered in rat droppings, and even the rats themselves being swept into the hoppers where sausages were being churned out for home consumption were disturbing. The imagery is enough to convert even the most dedicated carnivore into a vegetarian. President Theodore Roosevelt, understanding very well the power of the meat and packing industries, sent two commissioners, Charles P. Neill and James Bronson Reynolds, to investigate whether Sinclair’s descriptions were purely an author’s creative licence. The commissioners confirmed all Sinclair’s claims, except for one: apparently it was an exaggeration that workmen were falling into the vats and being rendered into pure leaf lard (the highest grade of lard). Sinclair’s novel and the subsequent report from Neill and Reynolds were in part responsible for the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which would help prevent adulterated or misbranded meat and meat products from being sold as food, and would try to raise the sanitary conditions of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. Sinclair later stated, ‘I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’
History suggests that people like Maggot Pete and his conspirators are simply carrying on an age-old tradition of repurposing old food. Condemned meat continually makes its way back into the human food chain and no country seems to be immune. In 2006, a 74-year-old German meat distributor committed suicide when he was linked to laundering expired meat back into the food chain. Police impounded more than 150 tonnes of expired meat – some more than four years out of date – from the company. In the summer of 2014, the fast food chain McDonald’s found itself embroiled in a tainted meat scandal. Shanghai Husi Food Co. was inspected after an undercover journalist exposed unhygienic handling of meat. The investigation revealed expired beef and chicken products being processed and repackaged with new expiration dates. The company supplies chicken and beef products to McDonald’s, Papa John’s, Burger King, Starbucks, KFC and Pizza Hut in China as well as about 20 per cent of McDonald’s products in Japan. The Japanese branches of the fast food giant stopped importing their meat from China and took the opportunity to introduce a tofu and fish version of the McNugget.
Is it possible to view these scams as an attempt to reduce waste? We’ve all done it on a small scale, whether our motives were to avoid wasting food or to avoid wasting money. We’ve pulled out that piece of meat from the fridge, looked at the ‘use by’ date and sighed. Then, we have cautiously opened up the package and had a sniff. Barring no ill odours, we may poke and prod the meat with our fingers, maybe even lift it out of the packaging and take a good 360-degree view. After another glance at the label and some mental maths to count back the days, we make a decision either way – bin it or eat it. If it’s the latter, we probably cook the hell out of it, killing all signs of potential life and any flavour along with it. Then, we spend the next 24 hours in a heightened awareness of all our bodily functions.
It’s hard to say how many people get sick each year from eating expired meat as publicly available statistics do not separate illness as a result of eating expired meat from something like bad hygiene or insufficient cooking. The FDA in the US and the FSA in the UK are more concerned about tracking the prevalence of infectious agents (bacterial, viral, chemical and parasitic), whether it’s Salmonella or Listeria, and identifying new and particularly virulent strains of bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7. Whether the bacteria is there because the food wasn’t cooked correctly, or because of cross-contamination between cooked food and uncooked food, or because of an employee’s poor washroom habits, is of slightly less concern than what kind of bacteria it is, how widespread it is and how the illness can be contained. It boils down to a matter of risk management. US outbreak statistics from 1998 to 2008 show that 22 per cent of foodborne illnesses were attributed to meat and poultry. Just as a comparison, vegetables were responsible for 34.2 per cent and shellfish a mere 3.4 per cent.3 Some of that 22 per cent may be the result of eating expired meat, but the vast majority is not.
While trying to find examples of people becoming ill as a result of expired meat scams, we came across pages upon pages – entire forums even – devoted to the discussion of eating expired meat. Some tout the health benefits of eating purposely rotted meat. The late Dr Aajonus Vonderplanitz, for example, who turned to a diet of raw rotting meat after being introduced to it by some of the indigenous peoples of Alaska. He called it the primal diet. Some discussions are prompted by panicked mothers who have just inadvertently fed their families minced beef that expired a week ago. Others are queries about how to prepare expired meat and how long, exactly, can it be expired before things get really dangerous. It became clear to us while writing this chapter that there are a large number of people out there intentionally buying reduced meat that’s close to expiry and genuinely researching ways to reduce their exposure to food poisoning. It is the modern-day Saturday-night market.
The FSA estimates that at least 40 per cent of consumers are prepared to eat food that is past its use-by date. And as with all aspects of life, some people are greater risk takers than others. Whether motivated by money, following a primal diet or a desire not to waste the steaks rediscovered in the back of the fridge, people are making the decision to eat expired meat daily. The difference, of course, is that they are making that decision. They are using a number of different sensory clues (the smell and look of the meat) and their own personal past experiences (some people have stomachs of steel) to make their decision. It becomes fraudulent when this decision is taken away from the consumer, when consumers are sold something that isn’t what it claims to be, or when the tell-tale signs of bad meat have been cut away and masked by chemicals. It is then that consumers should be armed with the knowledge that if a deal seems too good to be true then it probably is – particularly in the world of meat.
Tight reins
Meat is a targeted commodity for fraud because, quite simply, it’s a high-end product. And, as well as being expensive, there is an increasing appetite for it. Our ever-increasing population on this planet, and in particular an expanding middle class (in terms of both numbers and girth), is creating an unprecedented demand for animal-based protein. In 1964, the global average for meat consumption was 24.2kg (53.3lb) per person per year. Thirty years later, this average had increased by more than 10 kilos (22lb) – equal to about five chickens more a year. Meat-loving countries such as Australia, US, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Argentina bring the global average up with annual per capita consumptions of over 100kg (220lb). But it is a shift in countries where people have traditionally eaten very little meat that is creating the biggest change. The average consumption of meat in China in 1961 was 3.6kg (7.9lb) per person per year, but by 2011 this average had increased to over 50kg (110lb). With a population of over 1.35 billion, this is bound to have an impact on global demand for meat.
Though there are significant profit margins to be had in shady meat, there is also considerable risk. Meat is one of the most highly regulated food products. There are numerous reasons for this: there are welfare concerns for the animals; carcasses carry disease that can be transferred to consumers; the nature of the slaughtering process has the potential to introduce bacteria that can be harmful if eaten; and, as we’ve mentioned, it’s vulnerable to fraud.
In the UK, food hygiene legislation requires that all meat processing plants be approved by the FSA or, in some cases, the local authority. Slaughterhouses, cutting plants and establishments that handle game are subject to routine inspections and audits as well as veterinary controls. Every certified abattoir has an official government-employed veterinary surgeon and government meat inspector present in the plant and on the processing line any time the plant is in operation. When the animals arrive at an abattoir they are given an ante-mortem health inspection by the veterinarian. Their paperwork is also inspected. The animals are stunned and then slaughtered. Once the animals have been skinned (or not, in the case of poultry) and the organs removed, the veterinarian conducts a post-mortem inspection to detect diseases that may be a risk to public or animal health, to look for residues or contaminants that exceed legislated levels, to assess the risk of non-visible contamination and to look for anything else that may lead to the meat being declared unfit for human consumption. They also look for evidence of injuries that may indicate animal welfare concerns. Nearly 940 million animals are killed for human consumption in the UK in a single year, and over 850 million of these are chickens. This is a lot of inspections. Many of these animals will be rejected for human consumption for one of three reasons: the animal contains pathogens harmful to humans, it hasn’t met certain legal requirements, or it is aesthetically unpleasing. Most of the meat rejected in the UK is discarded for aesthetic reasons. Between 2012 and 2014, over five million red meat animals (this doesn’t include poultry, but does include pigs) were recorded as having conditions such as pneumonia, abscesses, septicaemia (blood poisoning), tumours and tuberculosis. Many of the diseases identified present no risk to humans, yet they may change the look of the meat in a way that would make it unappealing to consumers. For example, Cysticercus ovis is the larval stage of the tapeworm parasite Taenia ovis, which finds comfort in the intestines of dogs and wild carnivores, using sheep and goats as intermediate hosts. It is not a threat to humans, yet over 190,000 animals were rejected for C. ovis cysts between 2012 and 2014. People are more likely to pick up a nasty parasite from letting their dog lick them on the mouth ... but we digress. The point is that these rejection rates are a reflection of tight regulations.
Horse on the loose
Yet, despite tight reins, the horses got loose – as anyone who ate a beefburger or lasagne from some of the leading UK supermarket chains in early 2013 probably knows. Irish authorities announced that routine testing using DNA-based methods had detected horse meat in beef products in December 2012, but they couldn’t state the quantity. Further tests using quantitative PCR analysis estimated that frozen Tesco value-brand beefburgers contained up to 29 per cent horse meat.
Quantitative or real-time PCR amplifies targeted sections of DNA and is sensitive enough to detect adulteration levels of 0.1 per cent. Most importantly, it can quantify the different species detected. DNA is extracted from a sample of burger labelled as ‘all beef’. The sample DNA is then mixed with all the ingredients that are necessary to help make copies of the targeted region of DNA. This includes: species-specific primers that bind to the area to be replicated; enzymes, which are the agents that facilitate the copying process; and free nucleic acids, which are the building blocks used to make the copies. A fragment of DNA, known as a probe, is also added to the mix. This probe is labelled with a fluorescing molecule and has been designed to bind to the copied DNA. The whole mixture undergoes a sequence of heating and cooling cycles, which control the activity of the enzyme that facilitates the copying. If, for example, the horse primer recognises horse DNA in the burger sample, it will bind to that site and the DNA will be replicated. If horse isn’t present, the primer won’t react. With real-time PCR, the DNA copies can be measured as the reaction happens by measuring the fluorescence of the probes that have attached to the replicated DNA. Then working backwards, the measure of fluorescence and the number of replication cycles can be used to estimate the quantity of DNA in the original sample.
As always, however, there are limitations. First, the most processed meats are also those most likely to have undergone treatments that have the potential to degrade the DNA. This obviously affects the ability to replicate it. Second, the amount of extractable DNA can also differ between tissues. This means that if horse organs and cartilage have been added to the burger rather than just muscle meat, calculating the relative quantity of DNA may be flawed if using a calibration standard of just muscle meat. Third, the test can only detect DNA fragments recognised by the primers added. The analysts were specifically trying to quantify horse in the beefburgers, so they would have added primers specific to horse DNA. There could actually be other species in there that wouldn’t be detected unless primers for them were also included. In other words, you’re not going to find a rat (sometimes literally) unless you’re looking for it.
Horse was also found in Findus lasagne and Tesco brand spaghetti bolognese. The FSA asked supermarkets and branded manufacturers to send all processed beef products for testing and a further 2,501 DNA-based tests were conducted to look for adulteration of beef products. Seven products were found to be affected in the end; frozen lasagne and spaghetti bolognese manufactured by Comigel was up to 100 per cent horse meat. There was undeclared pork found in the meat as well – 85 per cent of the tested products had undeclared pig DNA – but that didn’t make nearly as good a headline. Europeans wanted to know who took the beef out of their burgers and bolognese. As investigators tried to trace the source of horse through the supply chain, it quickly became evident that it was the complexity of the chain itself that was part of the problem.
For those who may not be well versed in Horsegate, this is a very brief overview of one strand of this complex chain unravelled by investigative journalists at the Guardian. Horses, some of which were sick and most of which were badly treated, were being illegally smuggled from Ireland to Scotland and on into England. Some of these horses ended up at the UK’s Red Lion abattoir, which had previously earned a dubious reputation for illegal and inhumane practices. Horse meat from the Red Lion was purchased by Dutch meat wholesaler Willy Selten BV. Investigations of the wholesaler led to the arrest of owner Willy Selten in May 2013. Selten’s business had received more than 300 tonnes of horse meat between 2011 and 2012 from England, Ireland and the Netherlands, yet the books only showed records of beef. The company was ordered to recall 50,000 tonnes of meat that it had sold to 16 European countries, on suspicion that it contained undeclared horse meat. Workers in the plant spoke anonymously to the Guardian journalists, stating that they had knowingly labelled horse as beef and that they had also received pallets of old meat that they would be asked to process after regular hours. ‘It smelled so bad that we had to cover our face with a cloth.’4 UK-based meat trader Norwest Foods International Ltd sourced frozen beef from Willy Selten for the beef processor ABP Food Group, owned by Irish beef baron Larry Goodman. ABP’s Silvercrest factory in County Monaghan, Ireland made frozen burgers with the beef and sold them on to Tesco, Burger King, Co op and Aldi in the UK. Norwest Foods and Silvercrest claim that they didn’t know the beef had been adulterated with horse and pork.
The supply chain took Irish horses to an English abattoir. The horse meat then moved to the Netherlands where it was mixed with beef at Willy Selten. It then travelled back to Ireland through a UK trader where it was processed into burgers and then shipped to the UK for sale. This actually seems pretty straightforward now that the journalists have laid it all out for us. Except that the Silvercrest factory that was making the burgers was using 40 different suppliers and the mixture of meat going into the hopper changes every half hour. Where do you even begin?
While most establishments along the meat supply chain are highly controlled, others are less so. Traders and brokers, for example, are a less regulated but essential step in the food supply chain; they ensure a constant supply of meat gets to the manufacturers and processors for the best price. They help things to run smoothly between manufacturers, processors and retailers and while they may not always be a physical link in the supply chain, they add to the layer of communication and paperwork when trying to trace things back.
Horsegate and dodgy chicken, like all food fraud, requires a certain amount of cooperation among the different points of the supply chain. Whether it’s slaughterhouses agreeing to take payment for waste that they previously paid to have removed or workers trimming putrid meat, they are all complicit in the crime. They are not asking questions because they don’t really want to know the answers. Professor Elliott’s report following Horsegate recognised the critical role industry staff play in identifying crime early on. The report recommends support for further development of whistleblowing mechanisms within industry culture so there is safety in asking questions and reporting unscrupulous activity. It may be reporting boxes of horse trimmings leaving the plant as minced beef or it may simply be questioning prices that are too good to be true. Whether they made a conscious decision or not, the players in these frauds have all helped an illegitimate product to move through a perfectly legal framework.
Though Horsegate and Maggot Pete made a lot of headlines, it’s necessary to put meat fraud into some perspective. The USP’s Food Fraud Database, which they have kindly made available to the public, includes 25 reports of meat fraud occurring between 1997 and 2012. Compare this with 440 reports of fraud for oil and 320 for milk. Meat is by no means the most commonly tinkered-with food, yet for some reason it gets a lot of attention by the media and makes the public raise their steak knives in anger. It’s a sort of ‘You can fiddle with my fruit and mess with my milk, but don’t cheat my meat’ kind of attitude. Perhaps it’s because we feel we pay a lot for meat or because it is the centrepiece for many people’s meals? Whatever the reason, it’s fair to say that a little horse meat in some burgers and lasagne can certainly stir things up. However, it must be said that an unexpected side effect of the horse meat scandal was that the British public gained a new appetite for horse meat. One year after Horsegate broke, sales of horse meat had boomed because out of the media frenzy that ensued, one of the messages consumers took home was that horse meat is lean and healthy. Undoubtedly, too, a number of people were just curious as to whether they could taste the difference.
It’s all minced up
We saw in the previous chapter that species substitution is rampant in the seafood industry, but how often do our furry and feathered protein sources get swapped? Was Horsegate the exception or the rule?
In 1995, researchers from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services analysed over 900 meat samples collected from Florida retail markets; 806 were raw samples of meat and 96 were cooked. For their analysis they turned to proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins). One of the methods they used was ELISA (Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay), which is based on antibodies recognising and binding to specific animal proteins. For this technique, antibodies are developed for specific proteins, such as a heat-tolerant protein found in the muscle of pigs. The sample of ‘all beef’ sausage is mixed with the antibody and if the pig protein is present, it will bind to the antibody. The sample is then washed to get rid of any unbound sample. A second antibody can then be added, which is linked to an enzyme. This antibody binds to any bound pig protein. Finally, a labelling reagent is added. This reagent contains a substance that will be converted into a coloured product by the enzyme. This colour change can then be used to simply indicate presence of the protein of interest or it can be measured against a set of standards to determine the concentration of protein present.
Of the 900 meat samples, the researchers found that 149 (16.6 per cent) contained more than 1 per cent of an undeclared meat.5 The substitution rate was higher among the cooked meats (22.9 per cent) than the raw meats (15.9 per cent). The undeclared species found in minced beef and veal products were sheep, pork and poultry. However, it must be stated that immunoassays will only recognise the species that they have developed and added antibodies for. In other words, unless they added antibodies for rat and dog, they wouldn’t have found them.
In 2006, a group of Turkish researchers used immunoassays to test processed meat products such as fermented sausages, salami, frankfurters, pastrami, bacon and canned goods.6 They found 22 per cent were adulterated; 11 of the 28 sausages that were labelled as beef contained only chicken.
China has been riddled with meat substitution scandals. There have been reports of rat, mink and fox meat being transformed into mutton slices. Twenty thousand tonnes of meat were seized and more than 900 people were detained in association with the scandal. In early 2014, Walmart’s operations in China were recalling donkey meat because it had been adulterated with fox meat. Donkey is a very expensive meat and highly sought after for its tenderness and sweetness; fox, not so much.
Pork is swapped for beef, beef is swapped for buffalo, fat trimmings and offal (internal organs) are added to minced beef, chicken is sold as lamb, pork is sold as chicken, and beef and pork gristle and bones are injected into chicken. The list is long, and this is just substitutions between animal species. We haven’t yet mentioned the undeclared ingredients – such as added water, chickpea flour, rice flour and soy – that are added to meat to bulk it up.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that some of these undeclared species are the result of accidental cross-contamination. When a processor takes a carcass from a slaughterhouse and debones it and takes it down to smaller cuts, there are a number of leftover bits that aren’t particularly useful as a cut of meat, and these are called the trimmings. For beef, about 15 to 20 per cent of the carcass will end up as trimmings, so this is a significant amount of meat that it would be shameful to waste. The trimmings are shipped to a processor that then mixes the extra fatty trimmings with the extra lean trimmings to get the desired fat-to-lean content for their customers. It can then be packaged up as mince and sold on to other manufacturers or retailers, or processed further into things like burgers. Processors work with several different types of meat and so there is a possibility that some minced pork remnants will be left in the pipeline and get pushed through when the beef goes through the machine. As a result, there is some forgiveness in levels of contamination. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) uses a 1 per cent threshold – anything above this level of contamination is considered to be intentional adulteration.
As with any food, the more processed the meat, the more difficult it is to tell by visual inspection alone whether it’s been tampered with. By definition, mince is a mixture of meat that’s ground beyond any hints as to its animal origins. The only distinguishing feature the meat sitting in a plastic tray, bound by a thin layer of protective plastic wrapping, has is its colour. We can judge its animal origins based on its shade of red – ranging from pale poultry pink to vibrant venetian red venison. The fat content can be estimated based on the relative proportion of red bits and white bits. Freshness is assessed by the saturation of the colour – is it a dull grey colour or bright red? It’s not a lot to go on and even these attributes can be manipulated. While it’s easy to distinguish some turkey mince from beef, things can get more difficult between the red meats such as horse and beef.
Products such as sausages are among the most prone to adulteration. While there is the possibility of cross-contamination as we just mentioned, the more cynical (and one could argue realistic) viewpoint is that cheaper substitutions are easier to hide in a processed product. In 1991, researchers from the University of New South Wales, Australia went out and bought samples from butchers and supermarkets of the most commonly consumed sausages – thick beef, thin beef and thick pork.7 The researchers were interested in nutritional quality, but as there had been an article in the media about adulteration, they decided to test for other species in the samples using the ELISA method as well. Cow, sheep and pig meat were detected in all of the ‘all beef’ sausages, thick and thin. Of the 10 pork sausages tested, three contained only pork as labelled, three contained undeclared cow meat and the remaining four samples contained cow and sheep in the ‘pork’ sausage. Of the 30 sausages tested, only the three pork sausages were labelled correctly.
In 2012, researchers in South Africa examined a total of 139 processed meat products – from minced meat to deli meat – to look at what ingredients were not being declared on the label.8 They used the ELISA method to detect undeclared plant proteins, but also used DNA-based methods to look for a total of 14 animal species. They found undeclared plant and/or animal species in 95 (68 per cent) of the samples. The highest rates of adulteration were in sausages; nearly half of the sausages contained undeclared pork. All together, the meat products tested contained undeclared soy, gluten, beef, water buffalo, sheep, goat, donkey and chicken. The majority of the products were not complying with labelling laws.
Adding or substituting meats and using vegetable fillers to bulk up the end product in sausages and other highly processed meats isn’t difficult. It’s a matter of adding another ingredient into the giant mixer as it blends together the meats and spices. Doner meat is similar – it’s mince and spices mixed together – which is probably why 70 per cent of lamb kebabs from British takeaways tested in 2013 contained cheaper, undeclared meats.
Substitutions aren’t limited to highly processed meat
The techniques of the fraudsters are now sophisticated enough that substitutions can happen beyond the minced and processed meats. Let’s return to the example from China of fake mutton. Thinly shaved mutton slices are a popular hotpot ingredient. There have now been several scams unveiled in China that have involved the sale of fake mutton; one operation, raided in January 2013, had 40 tonnes of fake mutton and another 540 tonnes of materials to make more. Allegedly, rat, mink, fox and duck meat have all been used as the base for this fake product. These meats are apparently soaked in a cellulose gum (sodium carboxymethyl cellulose), which is commonly used in food manufacturing to extend shelf life, improve freeze/thaw stability and help bind water. In the making of fake mutton, this process allows the meat to take on more water and therefore increase its apparent weight. Food colouring is used to provide the ideal shade of mutton, and food adhesives (more on meat glue later) are used to bind the fake meat with real mutton fat. The end product is a passable, but not indistinguishable, version of mutton. What sets the fake apart is that the fat is not marbled throughout the meat as would be the case naturally. The fat and meat are quite separate and when it is thawed or cooked, the adhesive fails and one is left with fragments of fat and fragments of meat.
Despite what seems like an arduous process, making the fake mutton is worth the effort. The fraudsters can sell it wholesale to restaurants for about £2.12/kg (US$1.45/lb) less than the real thing, allowing them to undercut competitors selling real mutton. Forty tonnes of fake mutton would turn a profit of about £128,000 (US$192,000) – nearly 23 times the average annual salary in China for 2014.
In September 2013, police confiscated 20,000kg (44,000lb) of pork masquerading as beef from a factory in north-west China. Not mince, not sausages, not even thinly sliced ‘mutton’, but whole cuts of pork that had been made to look like beef. One wouldn’t think it was possible. The pork is mixed with beef extract and a glazing agent and left to sit for ninety minutes. When cooked, the meat takes on a dark beef-like appearance rather than the characteristic white pork colour. The beef extracts even give it the beefy aroma one would expect. Though it may be more difficult to swindle people over whole cuts of meat, this shows it’s not impossible.
If one end of the spectrum is to transform a pork chop into a steak, the other end is to change things at a microscopic scale. In 2001, the UK FSA released results of an investigation that was carried out jointly with 22 local authorities. They tested 68 samples of chicken breasts that were being sold to the catering trade and found that more than half of them were mislabelled, including some that contained undeclared hydrolysed protein. Hydrolysed protein is protein that’s been broken down into smaller segments known as peptides, usually using an enzyme. This can be a very useful process as it can remove the allergenic properties of proteins and make them more easily digestible. Baby formula, for example, contains hydrolysed milk proteins (casein or whey). Collagen, which is the main structural protein derived from bone, connective tissue, skin and hide, forms the ideal water-retaining agent when it is hydrolysed – gelatin – and it was this that was being added to the chicken breasts.
The protein powder is purchased by processors and made up into a brine solution. This solution is then directly injected into the breasts using needles, or the chicken breasts are tumbled with the solution in a machine like a cement mixer. Either way, the breast meat takes up this solution and the hydrolysed protein helps retain water, even while cooking. The result can be a product that actually contains as little as 55 per cent chicken; the rest is additives, including water. This is a perfectly legal process, but it must be labelled correctly as ‘chicken breast fillets with added hydrolysed chicken protein’.
The technique was developed by Dutch processors to introduce protein and water into salted chicken that they were importing from Brazil and Thailand. The processors were taking advantage of an EU tax loophole, as salted meat is subject to much lower import tariffs. By adding water to the chicken, they were making it more palatable but also effectively selling water for the price of chicken. Of the 68 samples taken by the FSA in 2001, 20 per cent contained undeclared hydrolysed protein.
Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that some Dutch manufacturers were not only adding undeclared hydrolysed protein, but also the protein was being extracted from other animals. The FSA conducted DNA testing on 25 samples and found that almost half of them contained traces of DNA from pigs, though all but one of those samples were labelled as halal (meat that adheres to Islamic law and certainly would not include pork). They suspected that beef protein was also being used, but their DNA-based methods weren’t picking up any beef DNA. The hydrolysed protein powders are extremely processed, making any DNA, if present at all, very difficult to detect – particularly when looking for a very small amount of beef or pork DNA in a lot of chicken. The proteins are also fragmented through processing, which eliminated the use of immunoassays, such as ELISA. The FSA needed a new test.
The FSA collaborated with researchers from the University of York who had developed new procedures to identify species of ancient bone fragments dug up in archaeological sites. Archaeological work suffers the same challenges faced by food forensics in that the proteins have decayed – though in the case of archaeology it is through time rather than processing. The researchers had discovered that the collagen protein found in bone has enough variation between species to be useful in fingerprinting collagen-based tissues (for example, bone, cartilage, skin, tendon, blood vessels). Luckily, the hydrolysed protein in the chicken breasts had been extracted from these types of tissues.
The technique the York researchers have developed is called ZooMS, short for ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry. For the analysis, proteins in the tissue sample are cut up into peptide fragments using the enzyme trypsin. The mass of each peptide is then determined using time-of-flight mass spectrometry, which essentially shoots the peptides out using an electric field and uses a detector to see how fast they fly a particular distance. This provides a unique mass-to-charge ratio for the peptides. Certain peptides (fragments of the collagen protein) are species-specific and can be identified by comparing them with a library of collagen proteins developed for different species.
As the chicken processors don’t make the hydrolysed protein powders themselves, the FSA conducted an investigation of the powders directly.9 They obtained five sample powders, four of which were made in the UK and all of which were labelled as containing only poultry-derived protein. They ran them through numerous tests, including the methods developed at York. They used real-time PCR to look for chicken DNA in three of the powders and found that two powders tested positive for chicken DNA only and one tested positive for chicken and pork DNA. Had the tests ended there, one might have suspected that only one of the powders had used species other than chicken. Luckily they didn’t stop. Analysis of the collagen protein showed that none of the protein in all five powders had been derived from chicken. All of them contained bovine collagen-specific peptides and two of them contained bovine and porcine-specific peptides. Interestingly, two of the powders also contained unidentified non-food animal peptides. The powders had tested positive for chicken DNA probably because a small amount of chicken blood had been added, which would mask any pork or beef DNA that was likely to be highly degraded. It was the analysis of the collagen proteins themselves that revealed the true sources of the hydrolysed protein in the powders. Mislabelled powder means that some chicken processors may be unaware that they’re injecting protein from other species. Some processors have shifted to the use of plant-based protein powders as a result. Yet it does not eliminate the fact that the process is introducing a lot of water that consumers are paying for, which is fine as long as it’s labelled as an added ingredient. Consumers can then make their own decisions about whether they want to pay for water. But when it’s undeclared ... that’s fraud.
Shaped shanks
Just as we consumers want the ease of a deboned, skinned fillet of fish, we are also on the lookout for no-mess meats. This, along with the industry’s genuine desire to reduce waste, has led to the evolution of formed meats. This perfectly legitimate process has found itself on the shady side of food fraud more than once. Ham is a perfectly good example of a popular formed meat. Traditionally, a ham referred to the rear leg of a pig, soaked in brine, smoked or dry-cured, then hung for weeks under the protection of a layer of fat and skin. These days, we can’t afford the time to hang our hocks and who wants to be slicing through a leg in the morning to make school lunches? We want our ham to be lean, pristine and perfectly shaped to fit within the confines of two slices of bread. Therefore, the majority of ham we find in supermarkets is formed from a number of different muscle cuts. The cuts of meat are sorted into batches of similar colours so that the end product looks like a product from a single muscle. The cuts are mixed with phosphates, salt, nitrite, colour enhancers and water. These additives give the end product the right colour and flavour and also help release the protein myosin from the meat, which acts as a natural gelling agent to help fuse the pieces together. The meat cuts are placed into a cooking bag and then into a meat press and cooked. The result is a nicely formed ham that can be sliced up and packaged ready for sandwich making.
Where the process starts to enter shady territory is when added ingredients, such as water, are not declared on the label. The process of forming and curing ham requires the introduction of water. But a report in 2005 by consumer watchdog Which? showed that wafer-thin hams from the major supermarkets contained up to 25 per cent water. Samples of canned ham were even higher. In response to the report, some manufacturers stated that they were offering products within a range of budgets and in order to produce cheaper products, more water is added. This is perfectly legal. In the UK, ham is understood by consumers to mean a formed product that contains water, but if more than 5 per cent of the product weight is added water, it needs to be declared on the label. Yet, there isn’t any requirement to say how much water is in the product. It’s easy to see the path to the dark side.
While ham is clearly something consumers recognise as a formed product, food technologies have become so advanced that some formed and reformed meat can be far less recognisable. Binding together several cuts of meat to form a single piece that, for most people, is indistinguishable from a cut that originates from a single muscle, such as filet mignon, has become a common culinary technique. The cuts used to form the meat aren’t necessarily of lower quality, but are perhaps just too small to form a single portion on their own – so it shouldn’t be assumed that the formed meat is of poor quality. However, once again, it needs to be declared as formed or reformed meat so as not to deceive customers. Labelling laws in most countries require formed or reformed meat to be labelled as such, but restaurants and the catering industry aren’t required to do so.
The meat cuts are bound together by transglutaminase. This is an enzyme that’s essential to life in that it catalyses the bonding between proteins. In a healthy organism, transglutaminase helps form the biological polymers important in blood clots as well as the growth of hair and skin. Elevated levels of the enzyme, however, have been associated with neurological diseases such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s and it may be responsible for helping to form the protein aggregations associated with these diseases. Transglutaminase is most commonly produced in commercial quantities through natural fermentation of the bacterial species Streptoverticillium mobaraense or through extraction from animal blood. It has been dubbed ‘meat glue’ in some circles and has received considerable attention from the media in North America. However, before we discuss the ethics of meat glue, let’s first take a moment to discuss blood-derived products in general as it may help inform the discussion.
Many millions of tonnes of blood are released (for lack of a better word) each year through the slaughter of animals for food. Blood is very high in protein (about 18 per cent). In fact by weight, blood is a better protein source than eggs and most meat. Many cultures have traditionally turned blood into culinary products, such as black pudding or sausage (eaten in a number of European countries, including Britain), blood pancakes (many Scandinavian and Baltic countries) and even blood tofu (China) to take advantage of this protein-rich resource. Yet many countries, including the US and Canada, are generally squeamish about blood-based food and so much of it is either literally poured down a drain or disposed of in a more responsible manner. This is incredibly wasteful and if a life must be taken for food it seems only respectful to use as much of it as possible. Industry profits are also greatly improved by reducing waste, which is why there was an outpouring of research into the potential uses of blood in the 1990s. By 2001, the industry was using about 30 per cent of blood released in slaughterhouses, and by now it is likely to be much more. Blood proteins are used by the food industry as binders, natural colour enhancers, emulsifiers, fat replacers and meat curing agents. For example, the red blood pigments are isolated and used as a natural colourant to enhance and homogenise the colour in that formed ham we referred to previously or, more dishonestly, to colour pork with a beef-like hue. These natural colourants are also used to increase the contrast between fat and meat so that salami isn’t simply different shades of grey.
Other blood products take advantage of the gelling properties of plasma. Plasma is tasteless and colourless and is a better binding agent than egg white – not to mention being less expensive. Food additives derived from blood plasma and isolated blood proteins, such as transglutaminase, duplicate the natural bonding process of muscle tissue and therefore make fabulous meat glue.
The point is, things aren’t always black pudding or white. Products such as meat glue are innovative responses to the waste associated with the food industry. Meat glue is a natural product that makes use of an otherwise wasted product (blood), and it’s used to transform a less valuable product (small cuts of meat) into a better quality product (a perfectly portioned piece of meat). In the right hands, it is a tool that can be used to create a culinary delight. In the wrong hands, it is an agent of deceit.
In 2010, the European Parliament decided that the risk of misleading consumers was too great and turned down the use of any additives that can be used as meat glue. They felt the benefits of such a product were outweighed by the risk of deception. EFSA had provided a positive opinion on meat glue in 2005 in terms of its safety. But the European Parliament’s 2010 decision took into consideration concerns that fusing pieces of meat together placed the outside surface areas of the meat, which are most prone to bacterial contamination, on the inside of the formed meat. As we all know, the inner portion of meat isn’t exposed to the same high temperatures as the surface, which may present a risk in terms of food safety. Alas, no meat glue for Europe.
Other mischievous meat manipulations
There are other forms of meat fraud in addition to disguising rotten meat, substituting species, adding undeclared water and mislabelling formed meat. Cheaper cuts of meat can be labelled as more expensive cuts – a rump steak masquerading as a sirloin, for example. Detecting this type of fraud comes down to superior product knowledge.
False claims can be made about the animal’s diet (grain-fed versus grass-fed) that can help fetch a higher price for the product. Meat animals can be reared to a slaughter weight much faster on a grain diet, containing corn and soy, than on a grass-only diet. However, grass-fed animals are sold for a premium because of some publicised nutritional benefits over those fed on grain. Meat from grass-fed animals is reported to be much lower in calories (though some argue that this diminishes the taste), to contain more omega-3 fatty acids and to have up to seven times more beta-carotene than meat from grain-fed animals. Once again, there is a price differential between two products that are indistinguishable to the consumer, presenting an opportunity for fraud. Grass-fed versus grain-fed can be distinguished using the same principles used to reveal corn syrup in honey and adulteration of maize oil. Corn, you may recall, is a C4 plant and a main constituent in grain diets. Therefore, the carbon isotope ratio of the meat can be used to distinguish whether the animal was eating mostly corn or mostly C3 grasses.
Chickens can be dishonestly labelled as free-range in order to earn a premium. Free-range chickens are more expensive than barn-reared, in part because they are raised in lower densities and slaughtered older than barn-reared. The premium for free-range chickens helps offset the fact that farmers can move fewer birds through their premises annually. And conscientious consumers don’t mind paying a little more for these birds as they believe that they have had a marginally better life. Once again, stable isotope analyses can be used to authenticate such claims. However, it is the nitrogen isotopes that are key here. Chickens that have had access to the outdoors naturally get more meat in their diet as they consume insects and other invertebrates outside. Because the heavier 15N isotope has a higher retention level in tissues, this is passed along the chain as animals eat each other. Animals higher in the food chain will accumulate more 15N relative to 14N in their tissues, which gives free-range chickens a different nitrogen isotope ratio from those raised on grain indoors.
There can also be deception around the geographical origins of the animal. Such dishonest labelling may be to avoid tariffs or contravene import bans. In some cases, it may be to appeal to consumers who are trying to buy products produced in their own country – customers trying to ‘Buy British’ for example. Country-of-origin testing is perhaps one of the most challenging areas of authenticity testing. The isoscapes described in Chapter 2 can help to reveal the origins of meat, because luckily we are what we eat as well as where we eat. The isotope ratios of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and strontium can be used together, along with measurements of trace elements, to narrow down where in the world an animal was reared. Isoscapes are useful tests to confirm that a lamb roast, for example, is consistent with an isotopic signature from the British Isles. They are less useful in taking a sample of meat and asking where in the world it is from, but this will change as more baseline data are gathered and collated from around the world.
Labelling laws are changing to try and improve traceability of meat products. Country-of-origin labelling has existed for beef in Europe since 2002, but as of April 2015 all fresh, chilled and frozen pork, sheep, goat and poultry also has to be labelled with country of origin and country of slaughter. And in February 2015, the European Parliament backed a resolution to introduce mandatory country-of-origin labelling for any meat used in processed food.
Motivations and implications
Though one might assume that the tight regulations around meat would discourage the fraudster, we have seen that this is clearly not the case. And, at the risk of being repetitive, the motives behind these meat shams are consistent with other types of food fraud: it’s about money. Again, the mindset of the criminals involved may fall anywhere along a spectrum from blind greed to innovative problem-solving. The swindlers may be opportunistic or systematic in their approach. But in the end, someone stands to gain from the action.
The implications of meat fraud are also similar to those we see in other commodities. There are obvious economic costs – to governments, to the industry and to consumers. Just as with seafood substitutions, we see mislabelling of species in order to avoid costly tariffs put in place by governments. The industry faces product recall costs, potential legal action and a hit to their bottom line as consumer trust is shattered. Consumers are out of pocket when they pay for one thing and get a lesser product ... even, in some cases, just water.
There are also severe health implications. It is only a matter of time before serious illnesses are caused by eating condemned meat that has been recycled back into the human food chain. With Horsegate, health concerns were raised that the animals were never intended for human consumption and therefore may have contained residues of drugs (steroids and antibiotics) beyond any legal limits for food. Substitutions may also mean that there are undeclared allergens that present a health risk to consumers.
Deception around the geographical origin of meat can have health risks for humans and other animals as well as other consequences. Concerns over BSE and vCJD prompted the EU to impose compulsory beef labelling rules in 2000 that require the geographical origin of the beef to be clearly labelled. Yet the beef protein injected into chicken breasts was of unknown provenance and therefore not without risk, as the prions responsible for these diseases are incredibly resistant to heat and processing. Furthermore, meat coming in from regions with a history of food-borne pathogens that is labelled as coming from a different origin may not be subjected to the same testing.
As with seafood substitution, there are environmental costs associated with meat substitution. An authenticity study carried out on South African wild meat products in 2013 found mountain zebra (Equus zebra), which is on the IUCN Red List, being sold as kudu (antelope).10
Perhaps relatively unique to the meat industry, however, is that there are numerous groups whose values and beliefs dictate what meat, if any, they eat and how it should be killed. Islamic and Jewish dietary laws prevent the consumption of pork. Therefore, the addition of pork in a lamb curry or a sausage labelled as all beef has serious religious implications. Hindus don’t eat beef, and so the knowledge that hydrolysed beef protein may be found in chicken breasts (labelled or not) is no doubt very distressing.
Vegetarians and vegans are, of course, not likely to be victims of meat fraud, and yet they aren’t entirely immune to animal-based swindles either. You will read in Chapter 7 that saffron has been adulterated with meat fibres. In 2014, routine government testing in Malaysia found pork DNA in two chocolate bars produced by Cadbury’s. This is concerning not only to sweet-toothed vegetarians, but also to the Muslims who make up more than 60 per cent of Malaysia’s population. Cheap blood protein is being explored for its emulsifying and coagulating properties outside of the meat industry. Blood proteins have been used to replace the very costly eggs used in many baked goods. Regulations state that this would need to be declared on the label, but catering, restaurants and bakery items sold loose don’t carry labels and one might not think to ask whether a cake contains beef protein. Though it seems somewhat counter-intuitive, vegan products can be more expensive as plant-based products are used instead of dairy foods; the premium price creates the economic incentive to substitute some cheaper ingredients.
Thank goodness for a little horse
As well as generating a market for horse meat in the UK, the Horsegate scandal managed to enrage consumers around the world who wanted greater transparency and more assurance of authenticity in their meat products. It has been a catalyst for potentially long-term and meaningful change.
The UK government responded with the Elliott review, which took an in-depth look at the integrity of Britain’s food supply. The findings were alarming and the recommendations substantial. The UK government accepted it all and started to implement recommendations outlined in the report, including the formation of a dedicated Food Crime Unit.
Businesses are now conducting fraud risk assessments, mapping their supply chains beyond the links connected directly to them (one step forward, one step back). They are taking a hard look at where their vulnerabilities lie: these may be on the floor of the processing plant, in their supply chains and/or in their offices. As we write this chapter, the trials linked to Horsegate continue to unfold and it is evident that food fraud doesn’t happen as an isolated offence. Books have to be cooked and paperwork needs to be forged. The Dutch meat wholesaler involved in Horsegate, Willy Selten, was found guilty of forging invoices, labels and decorations, and using forged documents to sell meat. He was sentenced to two and a half years in jail – a lenient sentence as the judge felt that Selten, now bankrupt and facing damage claims of €11 million (almost £8 million, over US$12 million), had already been punished. It’s the paperwork that gets them in the end.
Consumers in the UK changed their buying habits, claiming to buy less processed meat, fewer ready-meals and avoiding brands involved in the scandal. Immediately following the horse meat scandal 19 per cent of consumers surveyed said they were avoiding the products involved. Yet, one year later, this dropped to 9 per cent. We’re a forgetful and forgiving bunch.
What was ignored in the horse meat scandal was our relationship with the animals we eat. The fact that there was also pork in the minced beef didn’t make it into most of the media, but because we have a different relationship with horses from that with pigs, the horse meat made headlines. This touches on perhaps the most widespread fraud in our society, and we use the word fraud in this sense not in terms of a criminal act but in its reference to deceit. It is this. When we put down a beloved cat, dog or horse, we do it with the greatest of care and thought for the well-being of the animal. We are there with the veterinarian as an injection is administered to relieve our loved one of its pain and we pat a nose, hold a paw or stroke an ear as they pass. Unless we are raised on farms, or have seen the inside of a slaughterhouse processing up to 2,000 birds per hour, this is our understanding of animal death. And it is with this misconception of death that we so freely consume animals.
We won’t repeat what we’ve said elsewhere about reducing vulnerability to fraud – it’s the same with all commodities. When it comes to meat, however, there are a couple of additional things to keep in mind. Look at labels for information about added water, hydrolysed protein and formed or reformed meat to help you with your purchasing decision. If you choose to buy meat, buy less but of higher quality – there will be some nutritional and environmental benefits associated with this as well.
As for the future of meat fraud, we are looking at a growing population of meat lovers and it is evident that something will have to give. Thomas Robert Malthus, a great scholar and contemporary of Frederick Accum, said ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.’11 There is less land available to rear more animals that require more food and the energetics of it simply don’t make sense. Of all the grain used by developed countries, 70 per cent is fed to animals, which then use 90 per cent of the energy from that grain to keep themselves warm. With every step of the food chain there is considerable energy loss and so it is more efficient to eat low on the food chain. Add to this the energy inputs that modern-day farming requires – from irrigation and fertilisers to the energy required to convert ecosystems into pasture land – and the numbers behind a largely animal-based diet are not favourable. Remarkably, we have looked towards engineered muscles as a potential solution – meat grown from stem cells and exercised into roast-sized splendour independent of any living creatures. If this is our future, consider the potential for fraudsters. With some engineered muscle, horse trimmings, a little meat glue and some hydrolysed protein, the possibilities for deception are endless.