No, hot dogs do not contain human meat

By Jonah Bromwich, New York Times News Service

Thursday, Nov. 5, 2015 | 6:04 p.m.

The eye-catching headlines on the new findings started coming in waves. “Report: Human DNA Found in Hot Dogs” said USA Today, in a typical example.

This bizarre information came from a single document released on Oct. 17 by the consumer marketing arm of a company called Clear Labs, which had found traces of human DNA in 2 percent of the products sampled.

But don’t worry: There’s no evidence that hot-dog lovers are unwitting cannibals. It’s more a matter of hygiene in food production. The tiniest particles of hair, nails and skin could show up in these tests.

Even so, an executive at the company interviewed last week was unapologetic about the attention-grabbing finding.

“Its pretty unlikely that the human DNA piece is actually harmful to consumer health,” said Mahni Ghorashi, a Clear Labs founder. “We consider it more of a hygienic issue that degrades the quality of the food.”

Snopes, the rumor-debunking site, was rather more harsh, labeling the information “unproven.”

Consumers should brace themselves for more buzzworthy headlines as genome sequencing gets cheaper and Silicon Valley companies like Clear Labs, Beyond Meat and Soylent try to disrupt eating itself.

Chris Dixon, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Soylent, said a broad cultural fixation on Silicon Valley is focusing attention on new food technology. “People are much more interested in food startups now, partly because they are coming out of Silicon Valley, and they have the kind of Silicon Valley approach to things,” he said.

Beyond Meat, for example, is pushing synthetic meat. Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder and investor in the company, described the marketing approach: “Grow the brand as big as you can, like a fake it till you make it type of thing, and then back into it with a stellar product.”

The Clear Labs story was an effort to bring marketing attention to the company’s use of gene-sequencing technology, first pioneered by the Human Genome Project. Looking at regions of the genome called bar code regions, the company identifies traces of animal species in food samples, including those that are not supposed to be there. The Hot Dog Report did contain significant findings, notably that pork had been substituted for chicken and turkey in 3 percent of samples, and that 10 percent of vegetarian products contained real meat.

But it was the human DNA detail that took off on social media.

The focus on marketing by food startups should not be surprising. While the technology is getting faster and cheaper, startups still have to attract investors. The Clear Labs technology has been in development for over two years, costing about $8 million in venture funding to build the platform and database.

Ghorashi, of Clear Labs, said he expected the number of companies getting into the genome sequencing business to increase.

But while it put considerable effort in marketing the Hot Dog Report, Clear Labs refused to name the food brands that it claims were misleading customers.

“We’ve made a conscious choice not to be a whistleblowing group, and we never will be,” Ghorashi said. “We believe that alienating industry will ultimately hurt consumers more than help them.”

That exposed the startup to criticism. Dan Nosowitz, a journalist who covers the intersection of food and technology, recently questioned whether the company’s findings should be available only to “the entities that produce and sell the food.”

Nosowitz also urged skepticism about Silicon Valley food startups. They are prone to cherry-picking scientific evidence in order to come up with appealing messaging for their products, he said.

“There’s this mentality that if you can find a study that says something, it is irrefutably correct,” he said in an interview, “when in fact it’s chaos in the scientific world when it comes to nutrition.”

Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, expressed a view similar to that of Nosowitz but insisted that Silicon Valley’s approach to technology was a good fit for the food industry.

“I think about our chicken like I think about a big Wang computer at the beginning of the computing days,” he said. “It’s good, it works, it has some really good qualities to it, but it’s nowhere close to what’s in our labs today.”

Advocates of Beyond Meat’s effort to synthesize meat from amino acids, carbohydrates and fats promote the company as eco-friendly, an alternative for those concerned about animal welfare, climate change and health.

But Brown says that none of that matters if the food does not pass consumers’ taste test. He recalled something a friend said: “Innovation might be great for the iPhone but it’s not necessarily something I want to put in my mouth.”