Meat Glue
May 9th, 2011Via: Yahoo Shine:
It has recently come to my attention that a substance called transglutaminase (i.e. meat glue) has been used in the food industry for many years in order to trick us into thinking the food we eat is of a better quality.
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Meat glue is banned in the EU, but in the US, the FDA classifies it under GRAS (generally recognized as safe). Transglutaminase is not required to be posted on the ingredients list.
That’s horrible. Well, on more than one front.
I love my steaks rare. I’ve become very adept at cooking them to perfection rare. I refuse to eat a hamburger any way but well done. The reason is, I know the surface of the meat in a hamburger is mixed throughout the patty. On a steak, any surface that may be contaminated is on the outside. Well, so I thought.
As I love grilling my steaks, I have several things that I’m very sure I do. I trim away all the excess fat, so I can eat every bit that lands on my plate.
In the video, you can see him pulling apart a meat glue filet. I noticed several years ago that steaks had this fat that I didn’t recall seeing before. But as my cooking got better, I paid more attention to details. So this unusual fat where the meat pulls apart rather easily isn’t fat, it’s potentially hazardous meat glue. Great.
This settles it. I’m not buying meat from regular stores any more. I’m going to find a good butcher shop that processes the meat themselves, and if I catch them using it (which I carefully inspect meat that I’m grilling), I’m going to have to shop for meat elsewhere.
It’s a shame. When I was a kid, I grew up on a farm. We had cattle, which we had slaughtered. That was the absolutely best meat I’ve ever had. 20 years later, my farm has been sold a few times over. The butcher shop is hundreds of miles away, if it is even still in business.
Kevin, get ready for me to come down there. I need to set up a proper farm, where I know no one is tainting my food for profit.
@JW – after reading all about the way animals are raised & processed in the US I’m surprised you still eat meat, unless it’s organic.
Actually, I’m not all that happy about eating or drinking much of anything. Anything you can buy in the stores has been tainted somewhere along the line. You can’t even drink tap water without realizing that it’s full of chemicals. Since I’ve been helping friends with water filters (fine micron filters with carbon, that removes the chlorine and particulates). Since they seem it’s easier to wait for me to visit, I end up changing their filters for them. 5+ pounds of crud collected in just a month or two is not something I like to consider, especially where some of it is added intentionally.
@JW- I eat meat from my Amish farmer. I don’t know where you live but, sheesh. Even with my farmer I’m not “happy” about eating or drinking much of anything anymoe unless I know where the meat came from or whether the wine (hic) or food are organic. Period. Kaput. I like that you are helping people with their water. What a gift you are to humans.
To the best of my knowledge, “meat glue” isn’t actually dangerous. It’s just meat which has been enzymatically digested, not much different from what happens in your own gut.
The problem is that you can’t tell from just looking at a piece of meat and there’s no way to know the quality of meat used.
So, you can take several left-over cuts of beef, mix them with meat glue and sell the whole thing as a prime steak. It’s a marketing scam, allowing them to sell low-quality meat at high prices.