Meanwhile, in Iceland, a food official said his team had found a beef product which contained no meat at all.

Chief meat inspector Kjartan Hreinsson said a brand of locally produced beef pie found at a Reykjavik supermarket had "no mammalian DNA."

"That was the peculiar thing," he said. "It was labeled as beef pie, so it should be beef pie."

Hreinsson said they appeared to have been stuffed with some sort of vegetable matter.