Keeping horse meat out of burgers and hot dogs could become easier with a new technique.FreezeFrameStudio/iStock/Thinkstock As the United Kingdom forms a new crime unit designed to fight food fraud — in response to an uproar last year over horse meat being passed off as beef — scientists from Germany are reporting a technique for detecting meat adulteration. They describe their approach, which represents a vast improvement over current methods, in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Hans-Ulrich Humpf and colleagues note that food fraud is a major global economic problem. But they also say that adding, for example, horse or pork to other meats without disclosure also can cause consumers to violate their ethical standards and religious practices. The severity of the issue came to light last year in Europe when many ground beef products were found to contain horse meat. And some “beef” samples were as much as 100 percent equine. Food industry experts have attributed the wide-scale problem to organized crime. To help root out such fraudulent practices, food scientists and regulators have a couple of methods at their disposal. But these techniques occasionally yield false results, cannot detect more than one kind of adulterant or are ineffective at testing processed food, such as sausages. To address these problems, Humpf, along with Christoph von Bargen and Jens Brockmeyer, took another approach, building on the recent introduction of mass spectrometry for meat authentication.

The researchers designed a rapid and simple method for extracting and analyzing proteins from processed food to detect whether horse or pork meat is present. When they tested their approach, they found it was sensitive enough to reliably detect as little as 0.24 percent horse or pork meat even in highly processed beef samples.

"Meat Authentication: A New HPLC-MS/MS Based Method for the Fast and Sensitive Detection of Horse and Pork in Highly Processed Food"
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry