00:00Europe's best food safety experts are joining forces to crack down on fraud.
00:07Euronews is following them in this special series called The Food Detectives.
00:11In this episode, we're tracking meat from the farm to the butcher.
00:25We begin in central France, where food detective Donato Andoeser wants to detect cases of fraud in which lower-priced beef is sold as prime meat.
00:35Latrice has maybe tried to pass animals to feed in a system of production, for example, based on corn and corn,
00:45to pass animals to feed in idyllic conditions.
00:53Pinpointing whether there's any fraud involves costly and time-consuming farm inspections.
01:01But now, at the Inray French Agricultural Research Centre, Donato and his team have developed a portable device that uses infrared light to quickly check if beef was grass-fed or not.
01:13So, for this meat, what's the conclusion?
01:28From the fields of France to the picturesque German region of Bavaria, where food detective Andreas Romp is researching fraud in chicken meat.
01:44The liquid injected into the chicken imitates the meat, but these food detectives have worked out how to find it.
02:06With such precision, it's possible to spot where the liquid is in the chicken, but the food detectives have to be fast to catch the fraudsters.
02:34Food fraud is most often motivated by money.
02:46Unscrupulous suppliers want to sell a lower-quality product for a higher price.
02:51Such cases can end up in a criminal court.
02:54So courts have to be certain when fraud has been committed.
02:58And that's when they need the experts at Germany's Max Rubner Institute.
03:02Dagmar Brueggemann leads the team developing ultra-precise techniques to analyse meat.
03:08Good morning.
03:10In the process of the Watson project, we specialized on hamburger burgers.
03:16We can test if we can find a certain mix of organ and organ meat.
03:24And what concentration we can find.
03:28Their goal is to develop a super sensitive testing system that can be used in legal cases.
03:34And that means scrutinizing samples at a molecular level to be much more accurate than rapid tests that can even lead to false accusations of fraud.
03:43If a method is not exactly right and has a mistake of 25% of a mistake, it means that you don't recognize false tests, but that there may be a bigger problem that a unrighteous test is being false.
04:02That's why the accuracy is so important.
04:06Back in France, and Donato Andoesa now plans to test his device to detect grass-fed beef on cattle from Germany and Spain.
04:17So, does he think it's possible to eliminate fraud in his sector?
04:21Transparency total, I don't know, because we don't abord all the aspects of food and the conditions of production.
04:34But at least it will improve the transparency.
04:39That's all for this episode.
04:41The Food Detectives Series is part of the EU's Watson project funded by the Horizon Europe Programme.
04:47Next time, we're in Finland with the experts making farm products you can trust.
04:56See you there.
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