Turkey: Food Safety Questioned as Funny Honey & other Ersatz Products Hit Shelves

Turkey is rife with urban legends about the kebab maker who slips donkey meat into his mince to lower costs or the sausage maker whose sucuk (spicy beef sausage) is actually made of horse meat. Turns out these tales are not just the product of the Turkish imagination, with recent inspections made by Turkey's Ministry of Agriculture indicating that several products found on supermarket shelves contain some very troubling ingredients.

The Food, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Ministry has named six companies that its audits have discovered are deceiving customers by providing misleading information about the ingredients of the products.
In a written statement before the weekend, the ministry said laboratory analysis of the companies’ products had revealed that there was vegetable oil in “tulum” cheese, horsemeat in “fried beef,” white meat in “100 percent beef bologna” and undefined tissue as well as internal organs in “skinless sausages.”

According to the statement, the accused companies are Akgökseller Gıda (producing Hasan Dede “tulum” cheese), Birsen Güven Gıda (producing Yalçıntepe “tulum” cheese), Güldemce Gıda (producing Güldemce “tulum” cheese), Efraim Usta Lokantası (producing Yemek cooked beef), Etsan Gıda (producing Apikoğlu spicy bologna) and Karizma Beşler Et Tesisleri (producing Uludağ skinless sausages).

It is not immediately known if those companies will be prevented from selling their products across the country or if the ministry will deem a fine sufficient.

Speaking to Today’s Zaman last week, İslam Ali Kopuz from the İstanbul Commodity Exchange’s (İSTİB) meat products desk said minced chicken bone and skin were mixed together with red meat to produce sausage, salami and other similar products later be sold in the marketplace. Chicken normally wholesales for TL 7 per kilogram, but this unhealthy mixture can be bought for only TL 1 per kilogram by those unscrupulous companies, Kopuz said. “There would be no health hazard if they used normal chicken, but that would be costlier for the producers, and they obviously do not want to lose money,” he said.