Abstract
Some communities, particularly Muslims and Jews, are very concerned about the authenticity of food products labelled as Halal. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) has been used in this study to detect the adulteration of commercially available food products (frozen French fries) and vegetable oils (corn oil, sunflower oil, palm oil and olive oil) by lard. Lard-vegetable oil binary mixtures ranging from 1 to 20% (1, 5, 10 and 20% lard) were prepared and FTIR was able to detect levels of lard as low as 1% in all mixtures. The FTIR spectral regions at 1,405-1,365, 1,260-1,198, 935-910, 877-857 and 857-833/cm provided the basis for identification of lard either in lard-vegetable oil binary blends or in pre-frying vegetable oils extracted from frozen French fries. FTIR can be used to detect adulteration of processed food products by lard.