Sleight of Hand from the Meat Industry

Next time you're shopping for meat, poultry or fish, remember two words: meat glue.

Sounds disgusting, doesn't it? It's what the food industry uses to literally glue scraps and leftovers together to form one perfect-looking cut of meat. Scraps of beef, for instance, can be stuck together to form what looks like a perfect tenderloin; scraps of fish can be joined to form what looks like a fillet.

The obvious financial shenanigans aside--are you paying for the tenderloin, or for beef scraps?--let's look at what the meat glue itself is made from. The two primary kinds are very different, although both act as protein binders. The less objectionable type is transglutaminase, which in the 1960s was first isolated from guinea pig livers. Thankfully, I guess, the global operation known as Ajinomoto (purveyor of such fine flavor enhancers as MSG) began using bacteria to produce transglutaminase, which it sells under the brand name Activa.

Activa actually does look good when compared with the second type of meat glue, a combination of thrombin and fibrinogen, most often obtained from bovine and porcine blood plasma. Cow blood. Pig blood. In other words, your chicken may also be pork, at least in part. Your flounder may also be cow, at least in part.

The ick factor aside, if your supermarket is less than honest with consumers--yes, it's been known to happen--and your religion specifically excludes pork from your diet, you may be violating your own religious laws unknowingly. Or perhaps you're a modified vegetarian eating fish but not meat; again, you're violating your own moral and/or ethical standards without your knowledge.

The website of FX Technology, the Nebraska-based company that produces the thrombin-and-fibrinogen meat glue known as Fibrimex, says its products are "derived from a vast assortment of proteins," which is even more frightening than just knowing about the cows and pigs. The company also says their product will "change the way you think about meat."

Mission accomplished, Fibrimex! It already has.

FDA has their thumb on the scales

The last time I prepared frozen fish, I was amazed at the amount of water left in the dish after cooking. Lots and lots of water. I happened to mention it in passing to one of my (at that time) students, and he laughed.

He worked in a fish processing plant, he told me, and one of the things the company did to the product was add chemicals to the fish to make them retain water. Heaver fish, more money, he told me.

Turns out he was right on the money. The Codex Alimentarius, the global organization setting the standards for what's in our food supply, was created in 1963 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Also part of the Codex are our own FDA and USDA--and, of course, the industry insiders, lobbyists and industry-paid consultants that infest our federal agencies.

The Codex publishes standards for pretty much everything we can consume, and in their standards for frozen fish--Codex Stan 165-1989 Rev. 1, 1995, if you're curious--we find the following additives allowed: monosodium orthophosphate, monopotassium orthophosphate, tetrasodium diphosphate, tetrapotassium diphosphate, pentasodium triphosphate . . .

What they all have in common is their ability to retain water. (Well, that and fertilize your lawn.) What they also do is make more money for the companies using them in their products. An interesting study in the Pan-American Journal of Aquatic Sciences in 2008 says this: "Thus, the seafood processing companies have a great concern in retaining this water, first for economic reasons (seafood is sold by weight) and secondly, for the quality of the final product."

First, of course, the money; quality comes second. So they pump our fish up with chemicals to keep the water in them; the fish weigh more, the companies earn more, and we eat fish full of phosphates.

At least we get to keep the water the fish leave behind when we cook them. Bon appetit!