The authenticity of meat is now an important consideration in the multi-step food chain from production of animals on farm to consumer consumption of the final meat product. A range of techniques, involving analysis of elemental and molecular constituents of meat, fingerprint profiling and multivariate statistical analysis exists and these techniques are evolving in the quest to provide robust methods of establishing the dietary background of animals and the geographical origin of the meat derived from them. The potential application to meat authentication of techniques such as stable isotope ratio analysis applied to different animal tissues, measurement in meat of compounds directly derived from the diet of animals, such as fatty acids and fat soluble vitamins, and spectroscopy is explored. Challenges pertaining to the interpretation of data, as they relate to assignment of dietary background or geographical origin, are discussed.

在从农场生产动物到最终消费肉类的消费者消费的多步骤食品链中，肉的真实性现已成为重要考虑因素。存在一系列涉及肉的元素和分子成分分析，指纹图谱分析和多元统计分析的技术，这些技术正在不断发展，以寻求提供可靠的方法来建立动物的饮食背景和源自肉的地理分布他们。探索了诸如稳定同位素比分析应用于不同动物组织，在肉中测量直接来源于动物饮食的化合物（例如脂肪酸和脂溶性维生素）以及光谱学等技术在肉类鉴定中的潜在应用。与数据解释有关的挑战，