Windmill wrote
polygonum wrote
wrote
Dave Liquorice wrote
What I find rather disturbing is that no one in the whole long supply
chain, from abattoir to retail outlet, appears to have been routinely
testing that a batch of meat or product called "beef" really is 100%
beef.
PCR assays for horse could be made cheap enough for widespread
surveillance,
but it's not really the right approach. If you have to figure out after
the fact
what animal it came from, you really don't know enough about the
suppliers.
What's the next yucky thing going to be that we then have to check all
meat for?
Isn't that arse about face? We shouldn't be checking that beef isn't
horse - but that beef positively is beef! Anything else is not
acceptable.
I don’t care what meat is used as long as its fit for human consumption.
That’s not easy to test for tho, so its more practical to test whether
its any of the meats usually used for human consumption.
I suppose that some non-beef DNA is bound to be present. Plant DNA
from wheat/spices/whatever will also get multiplied by the PCR.
Yes, but its easy enough to just ignore all plant DNA if you
test for the meats usually used for human consumption and
don’t bother with the less likely stuff like fish DNA etc.
Maybe they could take just a few samples, every few months, and
subject them to rigorous analysis to identify every kind of DNA.
Its going to be much easier to just test for the DNA of the
meats normally used for human consumption instead.
That would be OK for many purposes because no
one will be poisoned in the intervening months.
It isnt about poisoning, there isnt much chance of getting
poisoned with the horse meat that’s been found lately.
And the other common situation seen currently is checking
that when an expensive type of fish is claimed that it isnt
one of much cheaper fish that’s been supplied instead.
But also do frequent widespread checks for the presence of a
wide range of noxious substances. Iodine 131 from Chernobyl
(or Japan?), growth hormones, antibiotics fed to cattle, etc.
It isnt really feasible to do that level of checking.
You basically have to check for only the most likely undesirables.
Those checks would likely be much simpler than a detailed DNA analysis.
They don’t do detailed DNA analysis of food, they just check for
specific DNAs and that very easy to do now and is done routinely now.