horse meat scandal

Please don’t bring home the bacon: Leah McLaren explains

Europe’s horse meat scandal seems tame compared to the exotic meats South Africans have been ingesting. Maria Eugenia D’Amato of the University of the Western Cape’s DNA forensics lab says researchers were curious to know which animals laid down their lives for biltong, the famous dried meat jerky snack. “One piece of dried meat,” D’Amato told Reuters, “looks like another.” Curiosity, as they say, killed the cat. Fortunately not this time. But they found 90 per cent of “wild” biltong—usually labelled as being made from kudu, a large antelope—was actually made from horse, pork, beef, giraffe—even kangaroo.

The British horse meat scandal is widening again, as a food inspectors announced Monday that they had found traces of horse meat in Ikea meatballs, which were manufactured in Sweden.