Remember the last time you had a burger? Juicy, beefy, meaty maybe flame grilled and a little
smoky...Or maybe it was a turkey or salmon burger. Remember the delicious flavor exploding
on your tongue? Can you trust that the meat patty you ate was actually what it purported
to be though?
During a series of tests done on ground meat items in the winter of 2012, the Food Safety
Authority of Ireland [FSAI] discovered the presence of equine DNA in several alleged
beef products.
In 27 beef burger products tested, just over ⅓ or 37% were positive for horse DNA, and
85% were positive for pig DNA. Thankfully, in all but one product, the equine presence
was at a very low level, about 0.3% horse DNA. However, the frozen beef patty product
‘Everyday Value Beef Burgers’ sold at Tesco markets and manufactured by Silvercrest
Foods, a subsidiary of huge, multinational food processor ABP Food Group was found to
have 29.1% equine DNA as well as pork DNA.
FSAI informed the Irish Department of Health and the Department of Agriculture, Food and
the Marine of the results of their tests. They also notified their British counterpart,
the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency.
On January 15, 2013 five retailers who sold the horse tainted beef products, Tesco, Dunnes
Stores, Aldi, Lidl and Iceland were informed of the test results. These five supermarkets
and a few other grocery stores ended up removing 10 million burgers products from shelves.
On January 16th, amid widespread media attention and public outrage, four subsidiaries of ABP
were accused of supplying adulterated meat. They were Silvercrest in County Monaghan,
Dalepak in North Yorkshire, Freshlink in Glasgow, ABP Nenagh in County Tipperary, Ireland and
Dairy Crest, Rossington. Supermarket Tesco immediately dropped Silvercrest as a frozen
meat supplier, but continued to use ABP as a provider of fresh meat.
Over the next several days the scandal continued to grow as the news set off a chain reaction
of meat investigations and testing by several groups and governments. Burger King for whom
Silvercrest was a regular supplier, switched beef patty providers just as a precaution.
Other major grocery retailers such as Sainsbury’s, Asda and the Co-op also removed some frozen
meat products as a precaution, but later the products were found not to contain horse.
However, Asda did its own testing and found 5% fresh horse meat in its personal brand
beef Bolognese sauce. The sauce was supplied by Greencore, an Irish food company. Greencore
said it purchased the meat in their sauce from ABP’s Nenagh plant. Both Greencore
and ABP ran tests and couldn’t find horse meat in the pasta sauce. However, Asda stood
by its test results.
ABP especially received a lot of criticism from the media and public. They blamed rogue
meat suppliers and claimed that their company had never knowingly sold horse meat.
On February 7, Findus, a food company announced that in a sample of 18 beef lasagne products
that it tested, 11 items contained between 60% and 100% horse meat. It also found that
there was 60%-100% horse meat in ground beef items. They traced the source of the tainted
meat back to Comigel, a third party French frozen ready meal producer. The adulterated
products had been made by Comigel’s subsidiary Tavola at a factory in Capellen, Luxembourg.
On February 14, the French government suspended the licence of French meat processing company
À la Table de Spanghero, claiming that the company knowingly imported horse meat from
Romania, relabeled it and sold it as beef. Meat had been back traced from France through
Cyprus and the Netherlands to Romanian abattoirs.
Over a 6 month period, Spanghero had shipped and sold 750 tons of adulterated meat. One
of the companies they sold to was Comigel. However Comigel wasn’t blameless either;
investigators felt that due to inconsistencies in the paperwork and the smell and look of
the meat when defrosted, Comigel staff should have realized that the meat was not beef.
A number of other companies were also found to have a wide range of issues with their
products: Nestlé found 1% horse DNA in its Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini,
made by German sub-contractor HJ Schypke and sold in Italy and Spain.
One of the largest private catering businesses in the UK, Sodexo which supplies 2,300 institutions
including schools, prisons and branches of the armed forces had to withdraw frozen beef
products after finding horse meat in a sample.
In an odd twist, upon testing, Gæðakokkar 30% beef meat pie which was sold in Iceland
was found to not contain any meat at all.
Pertinent to finding horse in beef products was the worry that the horse meat could contain
traces of the veterinary drug phenylbutazone, a common painkiller for horses. Even with
above board production of horse meat, there are regulations that horses treated with the
drug cannot legally be used for human consumption.
Further testing of horse tainted beef samples was done by multiple authorities and thankfully
the presence of phenylbutazone was not found in the majority of product. For samples where
the drug was found, the level of contamination was only 1.9 mg/kg a miniscule amount; that’s
less than 1/8th of a teaspoon per 2 pounds.
The UK's Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, stated that the level of contamination posed
very little risk to human health, adding that you’d have to eat around 500–600 100%
horse meat burgers to receive the daily human therapeutic dose of phenylbutazone.
When all was said and done, over 4 million dollars in meat products had been destroyed.
Authorities were not able to determine how many citizens in the EU unwittingly ate horsemeat.
The public was rightfully outraged, reputations were damaged and the sale of frozen hamburgers
fell by 43%. Sales of frozen ready meals containing beef fell by 13%.
Executives at various companies pointed fingers and blamed other companies. As a result of
the scandal, various countries in the EU began more rigorous testing of meat products and
doing more factory inspections. Countries also increased penalties and punishments for
those caught selling adulterated meat.
Initially, only a few lower to mid level people in the meat industry were arrested and charged
with fraud in the months after the horse meat scandal broke. However since then, a number
of arrests have happened, often in joint international stings involving people knowingly selling
mislabeled horse meat or selling horse meat considered unfit for human consumption.
Notably in July of 2017, the Guardia Civil, Spain’s national police in coordination
with Europol, the European police agency arrested 65 people involved in an organized ring believed
to be selling horse meat unfit for human consumption throughout Europe. The arrested were charged
with animal abuse, document forgery, perverting the course of justice, crimes against public
health, money laundering and being part of a criminal organization.
The EU continues to struggle with creating legislation and implementation of systems
that fully monitor and trace adulterated and contaminated food products.
During the horse meat scandal in Europe, some Americans were worried that horse meat tainted
beef was being sold in the US too. The U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA] was quick
to reassure the public, saying that adulterated beef was unlikely in the US food supply because
not only did no domestic suppliers slaughter horses, but the agency has strict labeling
and inspection standards for imported meat. However...individual species testing for meat
imported into the U.S. is typically only performed when there’s a reason to question a shipment.
Ultimately, the US has done limited research in regards to species testing in meat products.
A 2015 study by researchers Chapman University's Food Science Program did find that in 48 samples
of fresh and frozen ground meat products of various animals, 10 of the samples were mislabeled.
Of those, nine products were found to contain more species than the package label indicated.
The 10th sample label was completely inaccurate. Traces of horsemeat were found in two of the
samples.
The authors of the study thought that the findings of multiple species suggested the
possibility of cross-contamination at the processing facility, that equipment wasn’t
properly cleaned between the processing of products, so the meat mixed. Also the study
indicates the possibility of lower-cost species being intentionally mixed in with higher-cost
species for economic gain.
Unfortunately, since the Chapman study, there hasn't been further testing for various species
in meat products in the US. Individual companies and retailers do private testing, but unless
a widespread issue occurs, those tests will probably never come to light.
Now, if you live in America or a country that doesn’t eat horse meat, you might be a little
nauseated by now. We bear no judgement as to whether horses should be eaten or are just
for riding. While the idea of eating horse generally grosses out Britons and Americans,
once upon a time our countries did eat horse. In fact, during World War II when beef was
rationed, many Americans turned to horse meat as a cheap and tasty substitute.
Currently, in many other countries such as Iceland, Slovenia, Belgium, Germany, Poland
and China horse is simply another meat choice. Furthermore horse is actually considered a
delicacy in Japan, where it can be served as sashimi.
But all this is besides the point. What the scandal and various studies have revealed
is that multinational firms are controlling huge parts of the consumer food chain. Shady
decisions made by contractors of contractors sometimes in a different country affects what’s
on your plate. Food fraud is on the rise. A 2014 report estimated that food fraud costs
the global food industry $30 to $40 billion US every year. As well as adulterated products,
food fraud is also mislabeling products and even obscuring where products come from.
Can you as consumer trust what your food packaging says? In general, misleading or mislabeling
packaging seems to be a much bigger problem than potential adulterated mystery meat in
America.
But why does it matter if your burger which was labeled ‘Product of the USA’ came
from Texas or latin America? A variety of reasons. For example, some consumers have
made a decision to only purchase beef that was raised in a place where the rainforest
wasn’t destroyed to create pasture land for cattle. For others, minimizing the carbon
footprint of their food supply chain is important and they’d rather eat meat that was shipped
from only a few states away as opposed to flown in from thousands of miles away. Others
want their meat slaughtered a certain way for ethical or religious reasons. Also there’s
the simple but very important notion that consumers should be able to make purchasing
decisions based on accurate labeling.
Current gaps in American law allows cattle and pigs to be slaughtered overseas and imported
to the US, where they are cut up. Since they’re processed in the US, this allows companies
to slap a ‘Product of the USA’ sticker on them. How is that possible, you’re asking?
In 2015, the US congress voted to repeal laws that allowed the USDA to enforce Country of
Origin Labeling [COOL] requirements for beef and pork products. The World Trade Organization
[WTO] had ruled that Canada and Mexico could begin imposing more than $1 billion in tariffs
on U.S. products in retaliation for having to label meat products as produced in their
countries. They felt that some shoppers would eschew products labeled as having been imported
from Canada or Mexico. Worried about tariff issues, Congress repealed COOL and companies
have been using the repeal to their advantage ever since. However, in July of 2019 the current
congress showed some interest in reinstating COOL.
Beef is not the only protein that is mislabeled in the US. Seafood is frequently substituted
and mislabeled. In March of 2019, a marine conservation nonprofit Oceana, released a
new report on the state of seafood fraud in the U.S. They found that 20% of the 449 fish
for sale they tested were incorrectly labeled. To highlight how widespread the issue was,
the fish samples were purchased from different retailers in 24 different states and the District
of Columbia.
Among other findings, the report discussed that the most commonly mislabeled fish were
sea bass and snapper. Mislabeling often occurred in the case of cheaper, less desirable, imported
fish which were sold as local catch and when farm-raised fish were marketed as wild caught.
A previous Oceana report found that 59% of tuna sold in grocery stores and restaurants
is not actual tuna, and 87% percent of snapper isn't snapper.
In August 2019, Phillip R. Carawan the former owner of a supplier Capt. Neill's Seafood
pled guilty to having his company falsely label and sell over 179,872 pounds of foreign
crab meat from South America and Asia as a "Product of USA" making over $4 million in
the process.
It isn’t only meats that are targets of food fraud. According to the U.S. Pharmacopeial
Convention, a nonprofit which helps create standards for drugs, dietary supplements and
food ingredients, the top three adulterated and or mislabeled foods are milk, olive oil
and honey. These three are often cut with starches, less expensive oils and corn syrup,
respectively. Frankly, the issues we’ve been discussing are just the tip of the iceberg.
By now you may be thinking that you should raise and slaughter your own beef, catch your
own seafood, keep bees and plant olive trees. For many people that lifestyle simply isn’t
possible. So what can you do to ensure what you’are eating is actually what you think
you are eating?
Educate yourself. Some industries have created committees or task forces committed to ensuring
the quality and safety of their products. They sometimes put out reports testing items
and touting top quality products for their industry. The olive oil industry has actually
created seals that reputable companies can include on their labels, as a sign that the
product is of good quality.
If possible, purchase local. Get to know the sellers at your local farmer’s market or
co-op. You’re less likely to purchase mislabeled imported food there.
Also you can hold your elected officials responsible. Don’t be afraid to send an email or letter
to authorities detailing your concerns. Often the USDA has a comment period where they actively
seek public feedback when considering new regulations.
Ultimately, you can also vote with your wallet. When possible, don’t support companies or
retailers who have been revealed to be involved in mislabeling, promoting or selling fraudulent
products.
How safe do you think the food supply chain is in your country? Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video What Would Happen If You Only Ate Meat and
Nothing Else?! Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and
subscribe. See you next time!