**4. Authentication of h. alal Meat for Salami and Other Meat Products ¯**

With the increasing population, the demand for h. alal food products also increases, putting a ¯ responsibility upon government, jurisprudence and companies to certify h. alal products [ ¯ 78].

The matching of each product with the label statement is a quality requirement; in European countries it is mandatory that the products are labelled in accordance with Regulation (EC) n. 1169/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2011 on the provision of food information to consumers [24]. Furthermore, for h. alal foods, the need for clear ¯ h. alal labels, ensuring that the ¯ product (from the ingredients to the processing and handling) meets the appropriate requirements, is a critical issue. Due to the repeated discoveries of non-h. alal ingredients in food otherwise labelled ¯ as h. alal, the status concerning the determination of ¯ h. alal and non- ¯ h. alal food products needs to be ¯ carefully read.

The analytical authentication of h. alal foods has the purpose of solving problems such as fraud and ¯ adulteration of h. alal products that are highly critical both for importing countries (such as Malaysia, ¯ Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam) and for the top h. alal food exporters (Brazil, Australia, ¯ USA and France) [79–81]. Various h. alal supervision agencies work closely with food industries to ¯ obtain the permission to use their supervision agency's trademark symbol on their products.

H. alal authenticity is an issue of major concern in the food industry, and methods of lard detection ¯ have been performed for the investigation in food products such as cakes and chocolate [82,83]. Moreover, specific techniques able to exclude their possible contamination or fraud have been developed [84–86]. A frequent adulteration of meat products is the addition of pork to beef products, which is carried out for economic gain and represents a serious problem in the halal food industry, ¯ in particular for the authenticity of minced and homogenized meat products. Moreover, often companies producing halal meat products also process other kinds of meat, and thus cross-contaminations are ¯ possible. Therefore, many researches have been recently carried out for authenticating the species composition of meat products [87–91] and in particular the h. alal authentication studies are focused on ¯ the detection of pork derivatives (meat or lard) [92,93].

Different commercial kits which investigate porcine protein and DNA have been developed in many countries (such as USA, UK, France and Belgium) in order to establish the h. alal authenticity of ¯ food products [94]; kits are useful as they generally allow a rapid determination of the contamination, nevertheless the addition of meat different from pork could remain undetected. To date, different techniques are routinely applied for meat species detection and identification in food: in Tables 2 and 3, protein-based and genetic methods suitable for evaluating the authenticity of halal meat products are ¯ reported, respectively. Due to the characteristic of proteins that tend to denature at high temperatures, these methods have limitations in the detection of animal species from cooked, baked or heat-treated food products; on the contrary, DNA-based methods are more sensitive and reliable, as DNA is

found in a majority of cells, it is species-specific and is stable at higher temperatures [95]. However, meat processing could denature short DNA sequences [96] whilst the primary structure of peptides is relatively stable; for this reason a possible approach for highly processed meat authentication could be the combination of chromatography with mass spectrometry (MS), thus investigating the molecular weight and amino acid sequence of meat proteins [13].

