Issue #82 | Old (Extinct!) Meat 🥩 | Does Horizon Scanning Work? | Chocolate Magic |
2023-04-03
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Old (Extinct!) Meat - Would you eat woolly mammoth meatballs?
Does horizon scanning for food fraud actually work?
Food Safety News and Resources from the past week
A pastry chef makes magic with chocolate (just for fun)
Food fraud news, emerging issues and recent incidents
🎧 Audio is available for paying subscribers. Find the link at the bottom of the page 🎧
Hello,
Welcome to Issue 82 of The Rotten Apple and an extra big welcome to our new paying subscribers. Your 👏 subscriptions 👏 support the huge amount of work I do for this newsletter, scanning >1,500 articles every week, so I can deliver interesting, helpful and focussed content on food safety, food fraud and sustainable supply chains, without ads or promotional content. Thank you.
Do you eat meat? I do, though, like many of us, I am eating less these days.
Do you eat endangered animals? Probably not (… although don’t get me started on fish fraud and fraudulent fishing of protected species…. threatened species do end up on plates more often than you might expect).
Would you eat an extinct animal? Like, say a woolly mammoth? Last week, scientists from a cultured meat company revealed they have grown meat from woolly mammoth cells (sort of), and unveiled the result, an overgrown and slightly hairy-looking meatball. I briefly unpack the science of that this week.
Also this week: case studies in horizon scanning and chocolate mastery in action.
As always this issue includes a link to food safety news and resources for everyone and food fraud news for paying subscribers.
Have a lovely week and thank you for being a part of this community,
Karen
P.S. Our first live training event is on later this month. The topic is What’s New in Food Fraud Prevention Programs (VACCP) in 2023 (details). Everyone is welcome and recordings are available for paying subscribers.
Extinct Meat - Woolly Mammoth Meatballs
A cultured meat company has used cutting-edge technology to create woolly mammoth meatballs.
[The meatball] looked oddly furry, like it had been coughed up by a cat or rolled around by a dung beetle - The Atlantic, 31st March 2023
Reminder: cultured meat is made by growing animal muscle cells in vats of liquid nutrients, then filtering out the cells for further processing. The cells can be genetically modified to make them more suited to the process.
How did they do it?
A team of scientists at Vow cultured meat company, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Queensland (Australia), started by inserting the woolly mammoth myoglobin gene into sheep myoblasts using CRISPR technology.
CRISPER is a type of gene editing tech (learn more about gene editing versus genetic engineering in Issue 4).
Myoglobin is an oxygen-transporting protein, similar to haemoglobin in blood. Like haemoglobin, it has a reddish colour. Myoglobin transports and stores oxygen in muscles and is the protein that gives meat its red colour. Myoglobin is one of the most abundant proteins in meat and contributes to the flavour and moisture content as well as its colour. It has also been found to promote cell growth in cultured meat production.
Myoblasts are a type of stem cell that can differentiate into muscle cells.
The modified sheep cells containing mammoth myoglobin were then grown, removed from their growth vessel and cooked into a large meatball (source).
Why did they do it?
Because they can. This project is a marketing showcase for cultured meat - it fires up the imagination in a way that Singaporean chicken nuggets (the only legally available cultured meat) just can’t.
The project not only raises awareness of, and excitement about, cultured meat among consumers, it also demonstrates the seemingly limitless opportunities presented by cultured meat when it comes to custom-designed foods. If you can put mammoth myoglobin into sheep, you could, perhaps, boost vitamin B12 levels in chicken - less sexy, but more helpful to micro-nutrient deficient populations.
Of course, it’s also a bit about the company, Vow, showing off its abilities - that giant meatball shows that they can produce red meat at scale. Vow is soon to launch cultured quail meat in Singapore.
Would you eat mammoth meatballs?
I wouldn’t eat mammoth meatballs, and no one was planning to eat this one either. A key scientist for the project said that there is no way of knowing how the human immune system might react to a protein that “hasn’t been seen for thousands of years.” (source).
In terms of food safety, immune responses are a valid concern, but I am more worried about prions. Because of prions, I’m a lot less comfortable with cultured mammal meat (beef, sheep, mammoth), compared to cultured poultry meat (chicken, quail, dodo*).
Cultured meat processes could magnify the risks posed by prions - tiny molecules that cause catastrophic illnesses and that cannot be detected in food - and these risks haven’t been explored enough yet, at least not in public. Prion diseases have been linked to mammal-meat foods, whereas chickens, and presumably other birds, seem to be resistant to forming prions, and spontaneous prion diseases don’t occur – to our knowledge - in chickens.
*Dodo bird 🐦was the first animal the team considered for this project, but the DNA sequences they needed were not available (source).
Read more about prions and cultured meat safety in Issue 65.
Does Horizon Scanning Actually Work?
Horizon scanning is said to be a vital part of food fraud risk mitigation. But does it actually work?
Horizon scanning is the act of trying to anticipate threats that might develop in the future. It’s used in all sorts of fields and industries. For example, in health care, horizon scanning is used to provide early warnings for pandemics. In cybersecurity, horizon scanning might assess quantum computing developments for their potential impact on encryption systems.
In food fraud, and in food supply chains in general, horizon scanning is the act of trying to anticipate or predict how future situations might cause problems in supply chains or affect the likelihood of food fraud occurring.
Food fraud horizon scanning is a big part of my work. I spend hours searching for, reviewing and collecting future-risk food fraud-relevant information for paying subscribers and for our food fraud database (the Trello board) every week.
Horizon scanning is recommended by all food fraud experts, and it’s a non-negotiable requirement of the BRCGS food safety management system standard for tens of thousands of certified food companies worldwide.
But does it actually work? Does horizon scanning actually help to predict potential food fraud activities, and can those predictions be used to mitigate risk?
This is a big topic and one that I would love to see the food fraud academics get their teeth into. It’s certainly too large for me to fully analyse on a scientific level in this week’s newsletter!
What I want to do instead is share three ‘wins’ from our horizon scanning activities.
Orange juice
At the end of last year, I posted news of an emerging risk for oranges and orange juice in Issue 69 after reading an article in Bloomberg about a citrus tree disease in Brazil. The article warned of long-term supply issues and rising prices because Brazil is a major orange producer and because world production of orange juices has shifted towards Brazil after Florida’s orange crops were ravaged by the same disease. I warned that the predicted supply problems and rising prices could increase the likelihood of fraud, and said “Fraud could include misrepresentation of the origin or grade of fruit. For juices and concentrates, the addition of undeclared sweeteners or flavouring compounds is a risk”.
Just two months later, in February 2023, the media in Brazil reported on food fraud in orange juice. A factory making juice that was marketed as “whole orange juice” but was instead made with added water, sugars and concentrated juices had its operations suspended and tens of thousands of litres of its products seized by authorities after they found irregularities during an anti-fraud inspection.
This could be a coincidence. Or it could be evidence of the value of horizon scanning, even if it is only anecdotal evidence. Predictions like the one in this example can be used as a prompt to check fraud vulnerabilities, because supply chain pressures change and make food fraud more likely.
Eggs and bird flu
Over the past six months we’ve recorded multiple news items about egg production decreases and egg price increases and flagged these as having the potential to increase food fraud in eggs. The egg supply problems are blamed on bird flu and are being experienced in multiple countries.
Have there been more cases of food fraud in eggs due to bird flu? Perhaps; with food fraud usually ‘hidden’, it’s hard to know. But there has been at least one publicly reported egg fraud incident linked to bird flu, which occurred in February.
A large shipment of eggs was seized and destroyed in the Philippines because they were suspected of being from an area affected by bird flu and were not allowed to be imported into the area. The alleged fraud was related to the paperwork, which allegedly misrepresented the origin of the eggs to circumvent the import ban.
So horizon scanning told us to watch out for eggs because of bird flu, then we recorded a possible fraud in eggs due to bird flu. It’s not rocket science, but there appears to be value in the process of ‘watching’ for risks.
Meat in the United Kingdom
A leading food fraud commentator has revealed that testing for fraud-affected meat increased by 300 percent in the United Kingdom after enforcement authorities notified the food industry of possible problems, via the Food Industry Intelligence Network (FIIN) (source).
The food industry was told about the possibility of fraudulent labelling of imported beef as ‘British’ by the enforcement agency in 2021, and I included it as a horizon scanning record in our (Trello) food fraud database in October of that year. Eighteen months later, the (not)British beef scandal is now public knowledge, and is being reported in mainstream media.
In this case, the British food industry was forewarned about the possibility of fraud and increased the frequency of testing so that the fraud could be detected, and future frauds (hopefully) prevented.
Conclusion
Each of the three food fraud incidents described above was ‘flagged’ in advance by horizon scanning processes. Horizon scanning appears to have value as a food fraud mitigation activity, anecdotally at least.
In Short
🍏 Horizon scanning is used to anticipate threats that might develop in future, including food fraud vulnerabilities 🍏 Food fraud vulnerabilities change and it is important to keep up to date with potential new threats in food supply chains 🍏 News of supply chain pressures, price increases and enforcement investigations can provide indications of possible food fraud risks 🍏 Three recent food fraud incidents had been ‘flagged’ in past horizon scanning processes 🍏 These three incidents provide anecdotal evidence of the value of horizon scanning 🍏
This week’s horizon scanning news includes strawberries, lettuce and celery. Find it at the bottom of the email (for paying subscribers).
News and Resources
Our weekly roundup of global food safety news is carefully curated and free from filler, fluff and promotional junk. Click the preview box below to access it.
Chocolate Joy (This is Amazing!)
Just for fun
Watch a young pastry chef create a solid chocolate fire hydrant filled with raspberry + chilli cookies.
Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, incident reports, and emerging issues, plus an 🎧 audio version 🎧 so you can give your eyes a rest
📌 Food Fraud News 📌
Analytical databases – can you help?!
Does your laboratory or food business have a reference database of authentic food/ingredient/beverage samples that is used for analytical authenticity testing? It could be based on chemical, physical or sensory test results, and could be proprietary (in-house) or a shared data set.
If you do, please let the Food Authenticity Network (FAN) know, they are creating a list of organisations that have authenticity datasets as part of a new project.
https://www.foodauthenticity.global/blog/call-for-open-data-a-new-fan-partner-project
New Position Paper from EU JRC on Food Fraud
The Joint Research Council of the European Union has published a guidance document that assists
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