South Korea, one of the representative countries known for consuming dog meat, is experiencing a gradual decline in its consumption, and it is expected to be eradicated soon as there is no influx of new consumers. However, the cultural aspect of dog meat consumption is strong as it is deeply rooted in social traditions, and there is inadequate agreement on banning it legally. This article examines the laws related to dog meat and how it is currently managed. It also scrutinizes the animal welfare and food safety aspects of the process of dog meat breeding and distribution. The current legal management system for dog meat is inadequate, which poses risks in terms of food safety. In addition, the dogs used for food consumption are exposed to coarse environments from an animal welfare perspective. Until dog meat consumption is naturally eradicated, establishing a temporary hygiene management system to ensure food safety and improve animal welfare could be one solution.

The experiment was undertaken to measure the potential impact of animal welfare on the pork quality under two different farming systems: C1 and C2, two conventional farms; W, an animal welfare farm. Ten pigs (Landrace × Yorkshire × Duroc) of live weight 110 kg were randomly selected from each treatment, and slaughtered under uniform conditions. The left loins were collected, and subsequently analyzed for proximate composition, meat quality traits, fatty acids, free amino acids, and antioxidative dipeptides. Pork from the welfare farm (W) had greater back-fat depth and fat content, but the values were not significantly different from C1 or C2. The W loins had significantly lower moisture contents and pH values compared to C1 or C2. The C2 loins showed highest contents of unsaturated fatty acids, whereas C1 had higher polyunsaturated fatty acids as compared to W. The treatments did not show any significant differences in the contents of free aspartic acid. Anserine (an antioxidant dipeptide) from the W loins was significantly lower than that from the conventional farms. The results indicate that pork quality characteristics from animal welfare-farmed pigs were not different from those of conventional farms. Therefore, it would be appropriate to evaluate the industrial value of animal welfare livestock only at the stage of pig production, rather than the meat quality of pork.

In this study, the physical and sensorial properties of the meat analog were studied for the purpose of improving sensory preference and mimicking animal meat. The meat analog was made with different types of liquid materials such as oil, water, lecithin, polysorbate 80, or the emulsion of these components. At the aspect of density, the sample mixed with oil was higher than the sample mixed with water. Cooking loss value was higher at the sample with water than the sample with oil and this was the result opposite to the liquid holding capacity analysis. Also, texture profile analysis result showed that the samples with medium chain triglycerides (MCT) oil only showed the highest values in all attributes except for adhesiveness. Principal component analysis was carried out to analyze sensorial properties and it showed that the overall acceptance was high when the juiciness and softness increased. This result was highly related with the addition of emulsion. Therefore, emulsion technology can be a good candidate for improving the quality of meat analog and for mimicking the taste of animal meat.

In this study, two commercial PCR and ELISA test kits were examined for identification of eight animal species (beef, pork, chicken, duck, turkey, goat, lamb, and horse) from raw meat and meat products in Korea. The detection limit in RAW meat ELISA kit® on three types of meat samples blended with beef, pork and chicken, demonstrated that all meat species were differentiable down to 0.2%. RAW meat ELISA kit® on animal species resulted in differentiation rate of 94.5% for beef, 93.3% for pork, 90% for lamb, and 100% for chicken, duck, turkey, goat, and horse. In contrast, Powercheck Animal Species ID PCR kitTM resulted in 100% specificity at 0.05% limit of detection for all meat species. The detection limit of Cooked Meat ELISA kit® on mixed meat samples heat-treated with different temperatures and times, resulted in 0.1% for all heat-treated mixed meat except for chicken at 1.0%. Additionally, ELISA kit on sixty meat products resulted in specificity of 31.8% for ham, 13.6% for sausages, and 12.5% for ground processed products, and relatively low rate for more than 2 types of mixed meats. On the contrary, meat species differentiation using PCR kit showed higher percentage than that using ELISA kit®: 50.0% for ham, 41.7% for sausages, and 28.6% for ground processed meat. Futhermore, PCR kit on 54 dried beef meats detected pork genes in 13 products whereas ELISA kit showed negative results for all products. Hence, the possibility of cross-contamination during manufacturing process was investigated, and it was found that identical tumblers, straining trays, cutters and dryers were used in both beef and pork jerky production line, suggesting the inclusion of pork genes in beef products due to cross-contamination. In this study, PCR and ELISA test kits were found to be excellent methods for meat species differentiation in raw meat and heat-processed mixed meat. However, lower differentiation rate demonstrated in case of meat processed products raised the possibility of inclusion of other species due to cross-contamination during manufacturing process.

This study investigated the effects of a healthy image on the preference and intake frequency of meat and animal products. The study looked into beef, pork, chicken, sausage, mackerel, cutlass fish, croaker, tuna, squid, shrimp, clams, fish cakes, eggs, milk, yogurt, ice cream, and cheese. A total of 359 usable surveys given to elementary school students, college students, and adults were collected using a convenient sampling method. While milk had the healthiest image, sausage had the least healthy image. The respondents preferred yogurt the most and sausage the least. The intake frequency of eggs was the highest and clams the lowest. The healthy image, preference, and intake frequency for all studied foods showed significant differences across both gender and age. The relationship between healthy image and preference was significant for all foods, and a healthy image always had a positive influence on preference. The relationship of healthy image and intake frequency was significant in 14 foods except for mackerel, cutlass fish, and tuna. Also a healthy image created a positive effect on the intake frequency of 14 foods.