Food Safety Alert: The Problem With Meat Glue

April 21st, 2011. By Hunter West

Oh, you haven’t heard of meat glue? The food industry loves the stuff—and for good reason. Anything that would allow the morphing of a bucket of meat bits, like stewing beef for example, into what looks like a Grade A steak and commands a Grade A price at the counter, is akin to manna from heaven. 

To the untrained eye (meaning, you and me), it’s impossible to tell the difference. It looks like a steak. It grills like a steak. It tastes like a steak. But it’s not a steak, but rather chunks of meat that in a previous era would have been sold as stewing beef for a lot less than the kind of price a steak commands. But mix in some meat glue, roll it up and after six hours in the refrigerator, out comes a gelled roll that can be sliced into a series of lovely-looking, boneless steaks. 

The potential for fraud is obvious. Beyond the deception, however, why did the European Union ban meat glue last year? 

First, the back-story of what meat glue is. In fact, meat glue is actually an enzyme derived from thrombin and fibrogen, which is obtained from the blood plasma of swine and cattle. This is the stuff that causes blood to clot—and it also does a spiffy job, it turns out, of knitting small bits of meat together to appear like more expensive-looking steaks. 

Is meat glue harmful? Well, the European Food Safety Authority gave meat glue a positive safety opinion in 2005, only to ban it five years later. And a butcher participating in a story about meat glue on Australian television admonished the visiting reporter to don a protective mask (as did the butcher) prior to working with the meat glue enzyme that comes packaged in powdered form.

Apparently it’s not harmful to eat—but you don’t want to breathe the stuff in. 

Okay, so beyond the deception delivered by meat glue, what’s the problem? 

The concern, says a microbiologist interviewed by ‘TodayTonight’ television in Australia, is microbial. “If this food is sold, or represented as a solid piece of steak—and you cook it rare—you’re really leaving yourself open to get food poisoning.” 

To that point when you have a bunch of smaller pieces of meat with outside surface area already exposed to air and potential bacterial or microbial infection, now combined into a larger, single piece—it’s harder to cook such a hybrid thoroughly. 

“The amount of bacteria in one steak that’s been put together with meat glue is hundreds of times higher.” 

What’s more, transglutaminase enzyme can be used in beef, pork, lamb, poultry and even fish to bind smaller bits together to make a larger piece. But you never know what you’re getting. For example, beef can be bound with meat glue fashioned from pigs. Pork can be bound with meat glue derived from cattle. And so it goes. If you have an aversion for any of those meats, it could be a problem for you. 

The Australian investigative reporters noted that purveyors of meat glue are so good at their craft, it is almost impossible for even experienced butchers to tell the difference between the two. And meat that is glued together is allegedly everywhere—restaurants, the meat counter at supermarkets, and so it goes. 

Provided you like your meat well done on the grill, meat glue may not be an issue for you. But if you like your steak rare, you could be playing with fire if the comments from the Aussie microbiologist are any indication. You may take home a fresh slab of meat from the butcher. You might even slice off the end pieces before grilling, just to make sure that your dripping rare piece of steak won’t come back to bite you in the gut… 

But that fresh slab of meat may not be a fresh slab at all, but a glued specimen. And you never know the age, or the health of those pieces before they were glued together.

So…it appears that glued meat, unless it is thoroughly cooked, carries the potential for serious illness. 

Not to mention the utter fraud of selling a nice-looking steak at premium prices, when in actual fact it’s not a steak at all but stewing beef glued together to look like a steak. 

Check the price difference between a quality steak and a couple of pounds of stewing beef. 

It’s enough to make you see red… 

And if you fall ill from a piece of glued meat sold as fresh, there could be a variety of litigation defendants to choose from. 

Tags: EU, fibrogen, Food Poisoning, meat additive, meat glue, thrombin

This was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 6:20 am and is filed under Defective Products, Drugs/Medical, Food Illness . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.