European badger (Meles meles) – potential novelty enhancement for meat products

Abstract

Customers show increased interest in meat obtained from animals raised as naturally as possible. With the increased population, however, humans needs to consider the consummation of animals previously outside their focus. European badger (Meles meles) is a widespread adaptable species that could be inserted into the human diet as game meat addition. In this study, we prepared meatloaves with badger meat addition and performed analyses to determine chemical composition, amino acid, and fatty acid profiles. When compared to the control, we observed very few differences between the control without badger meat and experimental samples with various European badger meat additions. Regarding color changes, only yellowness was affected, and with the highest badger meat addition, we observed a 2.01 increase compared to the control group. In chemical composition, we observed a decrease in fat content by 1.50 % in the Exp_4 group compared to the control group. The amino acid profile showed no significant differences among groups. The most prevalent amino acids in our samples were Leucine and Lysine, approximately 2.06 and 2.25 g/100 g, respectively. Even with those unconvincing results, we believe badger meat should be considered an enhancement of the human diet, but maybe in a different form or product.