People 'scared' after finding out reality of what's inside their doner kebabs

Fancy a doner kebab? You might want to wait until you’ve read this.

A doner kebab is a British staple after a boozy night out, but have you ever wondered about what exactly goes into one?

Me neither, but thankfully, Food Unwrapped’s Jimmy Doherty decided to shine a light on this mystery.

He collected nine doner kebabs from nine different establishments and sent them to forensic scientist Paul Hancock for testing to determine exactly what was inside.

Now, most of us might assume that the takeaway favourite is made of 100 percent lamb, but Hancock decided to throw a spanner in the works and test that fact and looked for other types of meat including beef, chicken and pork.

He even tested for the more rarely eaten horse, donkey and goat.

The results? Only one of the nine tested passed with 100 percent lamb DNA, while the rest contained DNA from other animals.

Food Unwrapped/Channel 4

Hancock said: "There's only one doner kebab that is actually doing the real thing is the real deal.

"Most of them contain chicken. We've also got a couple which contain beef. Fortunately, we found no goat, no donkey, and no horse in any of the products."

Doherty asked what Hancock thought the outcome would be with a larger sample size.

"If I gave you 900 doner kebabs, who knows the kind of results we'd have found?” he asked.

Hancock replied: "I would expect to see probably around a 60 percent failure rate. That would probably be typical."

To nobody’s surprise, takeaway fans were slightly taken aback by the revelation with one person posting on the Food Unwrapped’s YouTube channel: “Even if I could overlook the rubbish mixed in with the meat the fact that these meats are heated and cooled many many times bothers me.”

Food Unwrapped/Channel 4

Another said: “Scary. What is really sad is that only one store out of nine used lamb. If they can get away with it and it costs them nothing, they will do it!"

A third added: “This is important to know often these kebab shops people tell people it's lamb but in reality contains beef and pork too. We might not care what its made of but still should be able to make informed decisions and they should punish these people who just add random stuff.”

But there were those who really couldn’t care what was in their doner.

One kebab-lover wrote: "As long as they taste like they do I'd still eat them even if it had humans in it.” That’s a bit grim, but each to their own.

Topics: YouTube, Channel 4, Food And Drink

Britt Jones