Due to recent issues regarding food's health and some providers' malice in changing beef for other types of meat, scientists have developed a way to tell what consumers are eating: a horsemeat test.
The necessity of the horsemeat test has become apparent over the last few years, particularly after a 2013 piece of news that saw the world in a stir: according to BBC at the time, IKEA restaurants in the Czech Republic turned out to have been selling horsemeat to their customers in meatballs, stirring up controversy and forcing the furniture chain to stop the sell of the food in all its European restaurants.
Unfortunately, the IKEA issue wasn't the only one going on in the world, as 2013 saw a series of problems regarding the very matter that made horsemeat testing the next step forward in this ordeal.
Following the scandal, it was decided that measures needed to be taken - and so the development of the horsemeat test began. According to Science Daily, the Norwich BioScience Institutes, in an alliance with Oxford Instruments, created a form of quick testing that would allow scientists to quickly know what type of meat they're confronting.
The new horsemeat test was designed to become a cheap alternative to DNA testing, which can be expensive and take up quite a while. The investigation where the new method is exposed was called "Authentication of beef versus horse meat using 60 MHz 1H NMR spectroscopy," and it proposes an interesting idea.
The way the horsemeat test was built, it highly depends on a technology called "Pulsar," which is an NMR spectrometer developed by Oxford. According to Science World Report, scientists would just need a few minutes where they'll shake a gram of meat in a particular solvent, then acquiring data from Pulsar. This way, they can tell horsemeat from beef - leaving millions around the world with an easy conscience.
