Horsemeat and lab responsibilities

You may think the horsemeat scandal is good news for European laboratory services and equine test kit suppliers - and it is. It is going to take months before the backlog of samples is all tested. Companies selling either ELISA kits looking for equine protein or PCR kits looking for equine DNA are undoubtedly rubbing their hands together with glee.

In the meantime, consumers still expect to be able to buy a single serve ready meal from Tesco’s for around $1.50. These same consumers are calling on the ‘government’ and the ‘food industry’ to increase testing regimes to ensure that the ready meals contain exactly what they say they contain.

The need for food manufacturers to produce the ready meals at very low prices fuels the financial incentive for fraud, adulteration and ingredient substitution as they struggle to maintain the low retail prices. So maybe the consumers are correct in calling for increased testing.

But this is not the answer to the horsemeat scandal. Let’s face it, any horse trader worth his salt will understand that all of his potential clients will be testing their ‘beef’ for horse contamination - so it will be pretty senseless to try and palm off horse as beef!

Even though adulterating beef with horsemeat is no longer likely to be successful, there are still strong financial incentives to pass off cheaper ingredients for dearer products. So the testing regime demanded by consumers has to be able to guess what product is being fraudulently adulterated with what and test for that.

This would only be simple if crystal balls worked.

Will the next adulteration scandal involve the addition of melamine to infant formulas to hype up the apparent protein content? No - that’s already been done and people are testing for this now.

How about replacing the emulsifier palm oil with Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, more commonly known as DEHP? No, already done in Taiwan.

So it is now up to the poor old analysts to determine what is being adulterated with what, test for it and then ensure the product does not reach the consumer. All this will, of course, have to be done in no time and for so little cost that the price of the food to the consumer does not increase.

Then when the next adulteration scandal arises, the testers will have to bear the brunt that their testing failed!

It’s all rather hard; I think I’ll go for lunch. Horse linguine anyone?