A Review on The Technology of Discriminating Different Types of Meat

With the increasing meat consumption worldwide, some packers supply meat fraud deceiving the origin or shelf-life of the meat. Initially, visual inspection was the only usable option to detect such meat fraud. However, as the need for meat discrimination was increased, methods were developed such as using DNA or chromatography-based technology. These technologies are diversely applied to discriminate species, breed, quality and detect frozen/thawed, and spoilage of fresh or processed meat. Despite their advancement, the present methods have clear limits to apply in the field; short time but low accuracy, long time but high accuracy, or short time and high accuracy but affected by the environment. Also, those technologies need highly skilled personnel, expensive equipment, and often cause irreversible changes to meat. Consequently, only specific examination or analysis institutions can evaluate, and it is barely accessible to consumers. Thus, a believable environment is the prerequisite, then, quick, precise, and non-destructive discrimination methods for anyone, or a system to cut the supply of fraud in meat by an interaction between the field and supervising institution should be established.