Nearly seven years ago a DNA test triggered the UK’s most notorious food scandal.
It was late 2012 and Irish food safety officials had niggling suspicions about the meat in supermarket freezers. A spike in the clandestine movement of horses around Europe had triggered alarm bells for the EU’s food safety monitors. That coupled with ongoing downward pressures on the price of beef was enough to leave chief executive Alan Reilly and his team with a hunch. They set about investigating.
What they found became known as “Horsegate”. Results from genetic tests found rates of equine DNA as high as 29 per cent buried in what should have been frozen beef burgers. It was far too much to be an accident. The discovery went onto spurn the withdrawal of millions of products, five government reports, a three-year police investigation and the conviction of three men for fraud. Last month another suspect, a Dutch trader, was picked up by Spanish police.
But food fraud keeps getting worse, with criminal gangs now targeting herbs, oils and health foods as well as seafood and meat. According to one estimate, as much as 10 per cent of all the food we consume could be adulterated. And earlier this year Operation Opson – a joint operation between Europol and Interpol to tackle fake food – seized €100m (£88m) worth of dangerous food and drink and made 672 arrests across 78 countries. Reports on the EU Food Fraud Network (used by member states to share suspicions) grew by 49 per cent between 2016 and 2018. And uncertainty at the borders triggered by Brexit could only make that worse, the likes of Professor Chris Elliott, who led the government inquiry into Horsegate, have warned.
“The criminals are still out there trying to get the better of us,” says Patrick O’Mahony, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland's (FSAI) chief specialist for food science and technology and one of the team behind that fateful discovery in 2013. The difference is that now food investigators are arming themselves with state-of-the-art DNA detection tools designed to catch criminals in the act.
The DNA test used to uncover Horsegate might have yielded the right result, but the technique was slow, expensive, and accredited labs were hard to find. It also used outdated methods for trawling through DNA sequences. But the scandal spurned a network of companies determined to find a better way to detect illicit food. “In the years since we found horsemeat every Tom, Dick and Harry is looking at ways of improving that technology,” says O’Mahony.
He and the FSAI are no exception. In May this year they uncovered contamination in herbs and spices being sold to unsuspecting shoppers in Ireland. Using next generation sequencing (NGS) they found packs of oregano bulked up with weeds and spice mixes blended with white mustard, an allergen that’s potentially lethal if undeclared. Unlike the targeted DNA tool they relied upon during Horsegate, which required you to know what you were looking for, this new scanning tool uses NGS to flag up any rogue DNA, whether you suspect it or not.
“Whereas before, to justify the cost of tests, you'd have to have to have a rough idea that there was something going on – and we had a hunch there was something going on with horses - with this you don't need that,” explains O’Mahony. “You can just say "I wonder if..." and then go off and do it.” The hope now is to use the technology to screen meat, poultry and fish at both national and EU level.
For Steven Newmaster, a botany professor at the University of Guelph and chief science officer at TRU-ID, “it's disruptive technology testing right in the supply chain that we need.” An expert in biodiversity and medicinal plants Newmaster laid bare the extent of adulteration in natural health products in North America, in the same year that Horsegate was unfolding in Europe.
Using DNA barcoding he and researchers had discovered that popular herbal supplements were being routinely diluted or replaced entirely with cheap fillers such as soybean, wheat and rice. In one case capsules labelled as St. John’s Wort, a supplement taken to relieve anxiety, had been entirely substituted with senna, a laxative. The discovery sparked an investigation by the then New York Attorney General which saw the likes of Walmart, Walgreens and Target slapped with cease and desist letters and ordered to remove some supplements from shelves, after follow-up tests showed up to 80 per cent adulteration in some cases.
“I went to industry and asked the question, how could we help?” says Newmaster. “They saw me as a corporate terrorist and told me to go away. But I didn’t. And seven years later I’m still knocking on the doors.”
This time though he’s holding the bCUBE. A square box, small enough to sit in the palm of your hand, the bCUBE has swapped “antiquated” DNA barcoding for a portable probe that plugs right into manufacturing facilities. It extracts DNA from any ingredient or product and shoots data up to a cloud system where algorithms match it to a genetic database that currently includes 63,000 species.
“It’s like a lab in your hand,” says Newmaster. “There are no dials, no way to manipulate that machine, I call it the easy bake oven. You prepare a sample, stick it in and close it.” In 45 minutes the machine spits out a result.
The technology has already been used by suppliers to run tests on supplements, fish, seafood and ground meat. “In almost every case a lower species has been substituted in. Especially in sushi. It's too easy. How many people can look at sushi and identify that more expensive piece of fish?”
White tuna and butterfish served up at Canadian sushi restaurants was routinely being swapped for cheaper escolar, TRU-ID’s DNA technology discovered in 2017. Too much of the fish, also known as snake mackerel can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, and the discovery led to calls on the government to tighten up traceability on seafood.
Others are working on takeaway DNA kits that will let curious citizens test the purity of their own food supplies. Sujeevan Ratnasingham, an associate director of informatics at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, launched Lifescanner in 2017, a detection tool designed to be quick, affordable and easy to use.
Anyone can order one of the kits online, collect a sample of food they’re curious (or suspicious) about, put it in the vial, shake, turn it upside down for five minutes and then post it off. A few days later an analysis of all the DNA it’s made up of is sent straight to their smartphone via an app. “Lifescanner was designed for use in low complexity scenarios as far as elementary schoolchildren,” says Ratnasingham. “The amount of training to use it is negligible.”
Already he says there’s an NGO in Canada that orders a pack of kits twice per year and hands them out to high school students to test for adulteration in their local grocery stores, information that they then share with food standards agencies. In the future he even envisions a “Yelp like review” system which sets out the authenticity findings on individual restaurants and grocery stores.
On top of that he’s working with a blockchain company to combine the two technologies. Just as, the theory goes, you can’t manipulate the blockchain ledger “the nice thing about DNA is it’s very hard to mislead at the outset.” Which is exactly why DNA remains at the root of detecting food fraud. Our eyes and tastebuds mightn’t not be able to distinguish between beef, say, and the slightly sweeter, slightly leaner mouthfeel of minced horse but there’s no fooling genetics.
But DNA isn't exactly a silver bullet in the fight against food fraud. For one, it’s incapable of detecting chemical rather than biological contamination, such as the infamous 2008 scandal in China in which milk was tainted with melamine killing six children and leaving 300,000 ill. It’s also powerless in the face of bigger drivers behind food fraud, such as fragmented and complex global supply chains, and the push for ever cheaper food.
At the very least, however, advocates for DNA testing hope that it leaves us in a far better position to take on the growing number of food fraudsters than having to rely on one very fortuitous hunch. And next time the spectre of Horsegate raises its head, they hope that the new tests will be enough to catch it before the tainted food reaches our mouths.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
