Most of the people read labels when they buy products. But what can you do when some of the products won’t say every ingredient used in the production? This happened in Canada, after researchers sampled sausages from grocery stores.
What They Found Was Revolting
A sausage out of five contained meat which wasn’t listed on their label. The University of Guelph had researchers take samples from 100 sausages that were raw and labeled as having only beef, chicken, pork or turkey. The results showed that 20% sausages contained other kinds of meat that the one labeled. Five sausages out of 15 which were labeled as turkey contained chicken meat.
The study showed that 6% beef sausage samples had pork in them, 20% chicken sausages had turkey or 5% out of them had beef and 5% pork sausages had beef.
A sausage contained horse meat.
Canada is known for having a highly safe food market but Robert Hanner, one of the researchers who conducted the study admitted that there are some gaps in systems that trace the foods.
Mislabeling is a Big Issue
We’re not picky, no one will die if the chicken sausage contained 5% beef, but mislabeling is a big concern and can be health threatening to people who are allergic to various food or meat. Also, some people don’t consume pork out of cultural, religious or personal reasons.
It is only right that consumers get what they paid for and this is also Robert Hanner’s point of view. He also added that they don’t understand how the meat got wrongly placed in other types of sausages. The amount of mislabeled meat was higher than what would have been considered residue on meat grinders.
Another case of unlabeled meat existent in foods was found in 2013 in UK and other European countries such as France, Norway, Sweden, Germany and many more, when beef products contained horsemeat. This made politicians check more closely the food industry and avoid supplying such products.
