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FRAUDSTERS who fill foodstuffs with offal instead of meat will soon find
they鈥檝e bitten off more than they can chew, according to a team of chemists at
the Institute of Food Research (IFR) in Norwich. The researchers have developed
an analytical technique that uses infrared spectroscopy to distinguish between
lean meat, offal and fat, and between beef, pork and other meats.

鈥淭here are a lot of issues about the adulteration of meat,鈥� says Gordon
Gresty, head of trading standards for North Yorkshire County Council. 鈥淚f you
take BSE, the public might see it as quite a serious problem if people are
putting beef in lamb mince.鈥� But it鈥檚 easy at present for unscrupulous food
producers to do so, or supplement their meat products with fat or unsavoury bits
of intestine and other offal鈥攍eaving consumers none the wiser.

Now Katherine Kemsley and her colleagues at the IFR have adapted the
technique of infrared spectroscopy to provide a quick and easy method for
analysing meat on an industrial scale. They will publish their results in a
forthcoming issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
.

The ratio of fat, protein and carbohydrate in animal tissue varies depending
on its type: steak contains more fat than intestines, for example. Each kind of
tissue can only absorb certain wavelengths of infrared light鈥攕o, by
exposing samples to a range of frequencies from infrared lamps and seeing which
ones are absorbed, it鈥檚 possible to take an infrared 鈥渇ingerprint鈥�. Computer
analysis of this reveals what type of tissue the sample contains.

The idea for the test came from a guest researcher at the IFR, Osama
Al-Jowder, who was looking for a quick, nondestructive method to detect pork in
meat imported into Bahrain, an Islamic state. The technique should be suitable
for screening large batches, as the infrared detectors could be made part of a
conveyor belt system.