Prosciutto, the scandal on the thighs with the fake brand: this is how to recognize what you wear on the table

Last year there was a scandal that shook Made in Italy at the table, Prosciuttopoli. There has been less talk of it than his reach deserved. Almost two million thighs of hams from Parma and San Daniele Dop lost sight, control bodies suspended and commissioned, the prosecutors in many cities to investigate a colossal fraud.
The legs removed from the circuit of the two Dop came from pigs born and raised in Italy. Nothing to do with tarocchi cold cuts made from German, Dutch or Danish raw materials. The scam was more subtle: the Italian sows were fertilized with seed of boars of Danish Duroc breed, forbidden by the production disciplinary, which instead contemplates the Italian Duroc. The difference is noteworthy: the pigs with the Danish father grew faster than ours and so they required a lower expense for breeding and feeding. Among other things, they were thinner and their flesh different from their thighs was sold more easily.

The farmers involved have been hundreds, between Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and Veneto, almost all of them confessed. "To start production again, the companies admitted to having participated in the fraud", explained one of the breeders' lawyers, Tom Servetto, at the time, but in the opinion of which, however, "it was the market that forced entrepreneurs to breed the Danish Duroc . The product was more appreciated: leaner meat and less waste. He was better paid. Everyone knew everything, but now it's just them who pay. "

ANIMAL TESTS
The investigations are going ahead. I imagine that the first convictions will soon arrive. But the most interesting news is these days. The Minister of Agricultural Policies Teresa Bellanova announced on Thursday the publication of a decree introducing DNA tests on leaders entering the chains of geographical indications. "From now on, the official system of checks on all PDO and PGI products that use heavy pork as raw material is strengthened, with transparent procedures and incontrovertible methods of analysis", Bellanova says, "which take as a reference a official database based on the DNA analysis of the breeders used ». In practice, the DNA of boars and sows whose meat enters, for example, the Prosciutti di Parma or San Daniele supply chain will be included in an official database so that it is possible to trace with certainty the parents of each individual slaughtered head.

In practice it will be possible to reconstruct the genetic map of all the pig heritage of our geographical indications. The breeds not included in the disciplinary rules would be identified immediately with absolute certainty. And finally the protection consortia are also moving. That of Parma, for example, has decided to create a list of allowed genetic types and a database containing all of them: for each boar the sequence of DNA will be recorded which can be compared with that of each individual ham. Of course, every boar that you want to insert in the DNA database will have to pass a kind of genetic suitability test first.

GENETIC FITNESS
On the other hand, genetic tests have long since entered the courts of half of Italy to ascertain the origin of the raw materials used in food production. The most glaring case concerns the 7 thousand tons of fake Italian extra virgin olive oil identified in 2015 at three large oil mills in Puglia from the then State Forestry Corps.
Thanks to the examination of the DNA it was possible to trace the origin of the raw material that arrived in that case from Syria, Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia. After a long confrontation between experts, the Bari Public Prosecutor foiled the fraudsters' attempt to declare the DNA test in the courts inadmissible. Now it will not be necessary to wait for the judiciary to intervene because, thanks to the preventive controls, any fraud in the pig sector would be discovered immediately.

by Attilio Barbieri