Shocking News About Meat
(Page 2 of 4)
June/July 2007
By Laura Sayre
This trend has everything to do with the larger transformation of meat production over the past 30 to 40 years. Meat without character or taste comes from livestock developed for rapid growth rather than flavor, fed grain instead of grass, given growth hormones, cooped up indoors, harvested young, and sold without traditional aging. Concerns about bacterial contamination — again exacerbated by industrial production methods — have led the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to advise thoroughly cooking meats, making it more likely that consumers will overcook their steaks and chops, hence the need for added “moistness.” And today’s pressed-for-time home cooks are less likely to employ the slow-cooking techniques that work best with less-expensive cuts.
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GAS-PACKAGED MEAT
Like injection systems, what the industry calls “modified atmospheric packaging” (MAP), has been around for a while, but has only recently come into widespread use. The process involves removing regular air from meat packages and replacing it with specific blends of gases, including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen. The objective is to control and “enhance” the natural color changes that freshly cut meats undergo as they’re exposed to regular air. This is especially true for beef, which under normal conditions changes from dark purplish red, to bright red, to brownish over a period of several days. Market research has taught retailers that customers will almost invariably choose bright red beef over purplish red beef, even though the latter actually is fresher. Today, by manipulating the “air” in the package, manufacturers can preserve the bright red color for weeks or even months, saving money on lost turnover in the meat case.
Meat pumping and gas-packaging technologies evolved hand-in-hand for two reasons: first, the way meat responds to atmospheric packaging can depend on what it has been pumped with; second, flavoring systems are sometimes needed to compensate for the unsavory effects of the gas packaging. High-oxygen packaging systems, for example, “can induce unwanted off-flavors from oxidation of the meat,” according to Kalsec Inc., a natural flavor system manufacturer.
BUYER BEWARE
New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle calls pumped meat “mushy, not tender, and way too salty. It’s a total consumer rip-off.” Pumped meats may appear less expensive than regular meats, but their value is diluted — literally. Instead of buying pure meat, you’re buying meat diluted with “a solution.”
