TMI (305)

A while ago, an article was published on CNN about the discovery of horse meat, or rather DNA, in hamburgers that were on sale in supermarkets in Britain and Ireland. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland published their findings on Tuesday morning. They showed that ten out of the twenty seven hamburger products that they tested contained horse DNA, i.e. they contained horse meat. Twenty three hamburger products out of the twenty seven contained pig DNA, or pig meat. To put this in perspective, thirty seven percent of the tested hamburger products contained horse meat and eighty five percent of the tested hamburger products contained pig meat.

 For those of you that are unaware, hamburgers come from cows. I will be the first one to admit that there is a lot of meat and ingredients in store bought hamburgers that may not be the plain ground beef that I really want. According to another article I found, most hamburgers probably have E. coli and the cows that the hamburgers come from are fed chicken feces. I really don’t need to go into the unappetizing meat industry so I’ll just go back to my specifically titled article.

One of the most shocking things I found out from the article was that in nine out of ten of the burger samples, there were relatively low levels of horse DNA but it one of those ten burgers, twenty nine percent of the burger was horse meat. As an AP Statistics student, I know that if that was the outcome of the sample, there is probably a higher chance of getting more horse meat in the burgers. That is absolutely disgusting. I would be curious to find the results of similar studies in other countries. Recently being in Ireland, I wonder exactly what was the meat I was eating?