EFSA savages UK proposals for ‘smokie’ sheep production
In May 2010, the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) urged the European Commission to amend EU law to permit the production of ‘smokies’, the common name for smoked skin on sheep carcasses. At present, their production is banned in the EU because hygiene legislation requires that all body parts of sheep intended for human consumption, except for the head and feet, be completely skinned.
Sheep farmers and meat processor in the UK could benefit from a potentially lucrative ₤3m annual market especially for lower-value sheep, such as cull ewes.
EFSA makes mincemeat of UK proposals
But the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) this week voiced significant concerns over the plans submitted by its UK counterpart for their production.
Experts from the Parma-based body said that while the FSA proposals described a hygienic production method and were a “first step” towards development of a safe production process, a large number of issued still needed to be addressed.
The FSA studies failed to evaluate or verify the food safety of burnt fleece skin-on sheep carcasses under variable conditions in comparison to conventional skin-off carcasses, said EFSA.
The identification of potential hazards was incomplete and did not cover biological risks such as spore-forming pathogenic bacteria, or chemical threats such as dioxins emitted from the fleece-burning process, added scientists from the Biohaz and CONTAM panels.
The UK research was also found to contain a raft of “problems” – including limitations in size, scope, objectives, parameters, design, conditions and analyses performed. The extensive inventory of short-comings went on to list inadequacies over “environment and processing, presence of adequate control treatments, number of replicates and samples analysed, size and carcass anatomical location of the samples analysed”.
Insufficient and inadequate
The EFSA opinion said the FSA’s microbiological analyses “did not consider pathogens but included only indicator organisms and concludes that low levels of indicator organisms do not necessarily assure product safety”.
But studies associated with specific process development objectives were approved by the European experts.
“However, the FSA studies presented are insufficient and inadequate to demonstrate the safety of burnt fleece skin-on as compared to conventional skin-off sheep carcasses,” concluded EFSA.
It added: “Similarly, the information supplied is insufficient to conclude that the process presented results in levels of harmful smoke-derived chemicals that are similar to those present in other smoked foods which represent a low level of concern for human health.”
The final concern was that since no method for the production of sheep feet had been proposed, it was not possible to conclude if this was safe.
