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EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

'Disused' animal products ideal for sick, elderly

Brussels-funded boffins say they have hit upon a brilliant method of creating "enriched" ice-cream, fortified with "disused" animal products which are normally thrown away by the meat industry as being unfit for human consumption.

A press release issued by an EU-funded "research media centre" breaks the news of the stunning developments achieved by Brussels' "Prospare" and "Rosano" projects. We are told:

Up to 50 per cent of the animal weight processed in the meat industry is discarded as left-overs ... despite being rich in proteins and lipids ... So the focus is now on reusing proteins. Today, only 22 per cent is converted by the food industry into feed and barely 3 per cent is consumed as food.

Despite the heroic efforts of the meat biz, in which every particle of jelly and gristle may be jetwashed out of the spinal column of a dead animal for later consumption - perhaps in sausage, pie or meat-paste format - and (as we have lately learned) the odd shortcut may be taken with respect to any dead horses that might be lying about, nonetheless huge tonnages of less-attractive meaty nourishment such as guts, eyes, tendons, cartilage, other connective tissue of various kinds, brains, hooves, genitals etc etc all tend to go to waste.

But the boffins of the EU Prospare and Rosano projects are having simply none of that. It appears that the lipid-rich bonanza of "disused" reject animal bits can easily be turned into a nutritious gunge, paste or gel of some type, apparently ideal for pumping by the hecatonne into processed foods such as ice cream. We are told:

The technology developed under the project is now being tested by a Belgian food company, called PROLIVER. It is hoping to enhance the nutritional quality of its protein hydrolysates, already sold in dietary, health and sports food supplements. One of the project partners, Mobitek-M, which is a Russian company specialised in production of protein-enriched food stuffs, is also planning on including these products into ice-cream, under the follow-up Rosano Project. They have built a plant in the Belgorod region of the Russian Federation, which is about to start of transforming functional animal protein at a capacity of one hundred tonnes per day.

Seemingly the horsemeat ice-cream or other products would be ideal as a dietary supplement for those needing "specialised protein products", such as "sick people, the elderly and athletes".

There's more from the Euro innovation mouthpieces here. ®

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