Pig farmer: Salami makers have duped Dominicans for 14 years

Santo Domingo.- Dominicans have no idea of how long they’ve been duped by salami makers into thinking they’re eating pork or beef, two meats absent fro those products for the last 14 years.

Dominican Pig Farms Association (Adogranja) director Pedro Porrello said they have reports waht salami makers pass off as pork and beef is in fact mechanically deboned meat (MDM) in most cases.

He said although the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved MDM as a meat byproduct or another ingredient, it isn’t meat and cannot be considered as such in the product’s content.

The row pitting sausage makers and pig and cattle farmers is precisely becuase the former have stopped buying locally raised animals and resorted to cheaper MDM instead, but continue passing off salami as having pork or beef.

Porrello explained that mechanically deboned meat is nothing more bones, marrow, entrails, chicken skin, and other parts that ordinary citizens discard or feed their dogs with.

"What’s done to get MDM is to compress all that strongly with machinery. On the other side, a strainer or a metal plate with holes, to let out the bone marrow and what can be separated from most of the internal organs, cartilage and other things that are added. In the case of the viscera, those go from one place to another without going through any prior process," the meat producer told elcaribe.com.do.