Food safety in sharp focus
WITHIN hours of the International Union of Science and Technology’s (IUFoST) World Congress ending in Dublin last week, news broke of yet another UK horse meat scandal.
Three men – two Brits and a Dane – are accused of conspiring to sell horse meat as beef.
The beef-that’s-actually-horse scandal first exploded in Europe in early 2013, when horse DNA was found in frozen burgers in several British and Irish supermarkets, shortly after our own donkey meat scandal.
Almost 70% of a sample of 139 processed meat products bought from butcheries across South Africa were found in DNA tests to have undeclared species in them, including, most shockingly, donkey, in one KZN case.
“Clearly, our consumers cannot generally accept that the meat products they buy are correctly labelled,” said Dr Donna-Maree Cawthorn, co-author of the study which was published in the international Food Control journal at the time.
And two local restaurants known for serving game were found to be passing off pork as warthog among other substitutions.
Food fraud – the deliberate manipulation, substitution or mislabelling of food – was a hot issue at the IUFoST congress. Much was said of the Chinese melamine-in-infant-formula scam, and fish species substitution, which is also an issue in South Africa.
At the weekend, Food Standards Scotland launched a new 24-hour food fraud hotline to help regulators and police tackle criminal activity in the food supply chain, and protect that country’s food reputation overseas.
And England launched a similar initiative in June, calling it Food Crime Confidential.
SA could do with something similar but cooperation between the various government departments overseeing food, and other industry stakeholders, is severely lacking.
And given the investment of time and money which DNA and other laboratory testing requires, it’s done sporadically, making food fraud a low risk activity.
In his presentation at the UIFoST congress last week, Tejas Bhatt, Director of the Institute of Food Technologists’ Global Food Traceability Centre in Washington, said while it wasn’t feasible or practical to test all food, farm to fork traceability would offer consumers meaningful protection against substitution.
“Traceability tells you where or how the problem happened,” he said.
“Whereas electronic goods were once the main target of black market cargo thieves, today it’s food,” Bhatt said. But a traceability system would flag a problem if a shipment takes longer than expected to arrive, for example, he said.
“It would allow food manufacturers to verify that their product was not interfered with along the way.”
Traceability is going to be the next big thing in food safety, Bhatt said. “There’s going to be a lot of change in the next three to five years.
● Another major theme of was eliminating food waste.
It’s estimated that a staggering 30% to 40% of food is wasted, worldwide. Interestingly, in developing countries, most of that waste occurs post-harvest through poor transport and storage methods, while in developed countries most of the waste is due to consumers who don’t understand expiry dates and throw out food that’s still perfectly good to eat.
A best-before date has nothing to do with food safety, only the quality of the food – so the biscuits may be softer and taste less fresh after their best-before date, but they won’t harm you.
Use by dates, on the other hand – on perishables such as meat – are about food safety, so don’t mess with those.
● Wendy’s trip to Dublin was funded by the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security, as a member of its steering committee. CONTACT WENDY: Email: consumer@knowler.co.za Twitter: @wendyknowler the congress