TORONTO – Burger-eating Canadians can return to their grills, or drive-through lanes without worry. Beef burgers in popular fast food chains and their frozen counterparts in Canada don’t contain horse meat, tests conducted in Ontario show.
As reports of hamburger patties containing horse meat surface across Europe, Canadian scientists at the University of Guelph took to testing our own country’s frozen and prepared products.
“This testing is something all Canadians should be proud of – knowing the hamburger meat they are buying is beef with no substitutes detected or additions,” said lead researcher Paul Hebert.
Fifteen sources of Canadian hamburger meat – six cooked and nine frozen – were put through advanced DNA testing by the university’s Biodiversity Institute of Ontario.
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Popular burgers on the list of tested items include:
A&W Mama Burger
Burger King’s Whopper
Dairy Queen’s FlameThrower
Harvey’s Original
McDonald’s Big Mac and Wendy’s Bacon Double Cheeseburger
They claim to be 100 per cent beef with no secondary DNA sources detected.
Meanwhile, among the uncooked varieties tested were:
Schneiders Beef Steakettes
Lick’s Homeburgers
No Name Beef Burgers
Outlaw Beef Burgers
President’s Choice Thick and Juicy Beef Burgers
Webers Beef Burgers
Fresh lean ground beef in a tube (Better Beef – Cargill)
Food Basics fresh lean ground beef
(A kangaroo burger from the University of Guelph’s Brass Taps campus restaurant was also tested. Results showed it was also pure kangaroo meat.)
DNA bar coding, a molecular technique developed by Hebert, was used in the study. The process allows scientists to match small DNA sequences from unknown specimens to those derived from expert-identified reference specimens.
The BIO has already used the technique in testing seafood to find problems with mislabeling.
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carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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