Kids eat paste. Why worry about meat glue?

You may have recently seen something on the internet, social media, or the news about something called ‘meat glue.’ What the heck is that?

What the media refers to as ‘meat glue,’ is known in the meat industry as transglutaminase (TG) or beef fibrin. They are enzymes used to bind proteins together. Enzymes are proteins that cause chemical reactions to happen in living things. There are several types of proteins in the body, proteins that hold things together (think tendons), proteins that make things move (muscle), proteins that break down food to produce energy (some of these are enzymes), proteins than break down other proteins (some of these are enzymes used as meat tenderizers), and proteins that help build other proteins to help them function correctly.

TG and fibrin fall into the last category. They help to build other proteins. They cause proteins in muscle to bind with one another to form a strong bond. So in meat, they can help bind two pieces of meat together.

Why is it used in the meat industry?



Beef tenderloin

 Muscles are all kinds of crazy shapes. Some are huge, some are long and skinny, some are shaped like triangles or trapezoids or who knows what. It is hard for butchers to take those muscles with all those different shapes and form them into cuts of meat that are the size and shape that people want to eat. For example, the tenderloin is the most tender muscle in the body and is used to make filet mignon. It is about as big around as a base ball at one end and tapers down to a point at the other. On one end, butchers can cut nice pretty round steaks, but as they cut more and more steaks, they get smaller and smaller. As the butcher gets closer and closer to the small end, the pieces are too small to make a nice steak. They are still the most tender muscle in the body, but they won’t make pretty, portion sized steaks. So, meat scientists and chefs use TG or fibrin to stick two tenderloins together with the skinny end of one adhered to the fatter end of the other one and visa versa. It is still tenderloin, still the most tender cut in the body, but with TG, butchers can cut more, pretty round steaks. More meat for everybody!

Sometimes, chefs use TG or fibrin to get the bacon to stick to filet mignon. I’ve seen examples of it used on salmon and to make that imitation crab stuff.

Where is it found?

If these ingredients are used in a food that you buy at the store, according to USDA, the food must be labeled ‘formed’ or ‘fabricated’ or ‘shaped’, as in ‘Formed Chicken Breast’ or ‘Fabricated Steaks.’ A meat product containing TG or fibrin will also have an “enzyme” to transglutaminase enzyme” in the ingredient list. When you cook them, you should treat them like ground meat and cook them to at least 160°F for red meat and all chicken should be cooked to 165°F. 

Of course, you can’t read ingredient statements when you dine at restaurants. You can always ask. Foods that are prepared prior to coming to the restaurant will have TG on their ingredient list, and a chef will be able to tell you if he or she is using it themselves. They should be trained in preparing foods containing TG safely, so it should be cooked to safe temperatures.

Some people are concerned that TG or fibrin are going to be used to turn cheap cuts of meat into cuts that can be sold at a higher price. Cheap cuts of meat are cheap for a reason; nothing can change the texture or flavor to make them like filet mignon. If a chef or a company were doing something like that, not only would it hurt their business, it would be against the law. The USDA dictates labeling laws on cuts of meat, and only tenderloin can be labeled as ‘tenderloin’. The folks at the American Meat Institute stated that they do not have any evidence that these deceptive practices are happening.

Furthermore, TG is too expensive to be used on cheap cuts of meat. Because of its price, you will only see it used on expensive cuts like tenderloin or salmon patties or in high-end restaurants where chefs demand higher prices. So, you’re not really consuming it very often. AMI estimates that about 8 million pounds of meat containing these products are sold annually, that is out of 49 billion pounds of beef and pork sold each year (0.016%).

As a meat scientist, I think that TG and enzymes like it are neat and exciting. I think it is fun to see what chefs and the guys and girls in research and development come up with using them. I don’t feel like we are trying to trick anyone. And, I know to cook these products to 160°F.

Here are some other good sources on transglutaminase and fibrin.

• This video is the best I’ve seen explaining the process and showing how TG is used.
• In this Meat Myth Crusher video, my friend Dr. Dana Hanson, from North Carolina State University explains how TG is used.
• This is a blog post about meat glue from culinary blog called Cooking Issues.
• This is a blog post from Chris Raines about Meat Glue.
• This is a statement about binding enzymes used in meat products from the American Meat Institute.

A fourth case of mad cow disease and still the safest food supply in the world.

As you may already know, a dairy cow in California was diagnosed with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad Cow Disease. The 10 year old cow died at an undisclosed dairy farm, and the disease was found when her body was sent to a rendering facility. Here is the official release from USDA.

Why am I not worried about this?

First, the cow was not destined for our food supply. She was at a rendering facility. These are companies that dispose of dead animals and produce inedible products. There is a testing system set in place by USDA to test the bodies of a certain number of the cows for BSE before they go through their process.

What about the milk she produced? BSE is not transmitted through milk.

I heard on the radio last week that her offspring are going to be euthanized to keep them out of the food supply, too.

What about the rest of the beef supply? BSE is not transmitted through meat, either. However, BSE is found in the nervous system. The USDA has very stringent rules in place to keep BSE out of our food supply.

What are those safeguards?

The molecule that causes BSE is only found in a few places in the body including the nervous system, small intestine, and tonsils. The small intestines and tonsils of all beef cattle are no longer used in the food supply. Also, BSE is much, much more prevalent in older animals. The USDA requires that beef processors look at the teeth of every animal slaughtered to determine how old they are. If they are older than 30 months, then the spinal cord, brain, eyes, and any parts that may contain nervous tissue are also removed from the food supply. They refer to those parts as Specified Risk Materials.

Cows that have BSE have a very hard time walking and eventually get where they can’t move on their own. We refer to those cows that cannot get up on their own as ‘down(ers)’ or non-ambulatory. Down cows are far more likely to have BSE, and when cows are down, veterinarians cannot observe the signs of BSE. Therefore, if a cow is down and cannot get up, then she may not be harvested for human food.

Also, BSE was previously transferred from cow to cow because meat and bone meal from cattle and sheep was fed to other cows as a protein source. The US (FDA) banned that practice in the 1997. So, we shouldn’t be spreading the disease anymore.

Are the safeguards working?

Yep. Like a charm. This was only the 4^th case in the US ever and last year there were only 29 cases worldwide. In 1992, there were over 37,000 cases.

Although some people were sickened in Britain in the 1980’s and 1990’s, no one in the US has been known to have been sickened from eating beef from BSE infected cows.

How do cows get BSE?

BSE is an infectious disease that is transferred from animal to animal in a rather unique way. The infectious agent of BSE is a protein called a prion (pronounced pree-on). All animals have prions. Prions, like all proteins, long chains that are folded up in a specific way. In healthy animals, the prions are folded into several helical shapes (kind of like a slinky gone wrong). Scientists call them alpha-helices.

 

In animals with BSE, the prions have refolded and the helical shapes have changed to flat, sheet structures, called beta-sheets. These beta-sheets allow the prions to stick together and form plaques. Those plaques cause changes in brain function and make the animal sick.

 What is weird about BSE is that, when these bad prions are introduced to the body, the bad prions teach the good prions how to be bad. Somehow, they cause the healthy prions to refold themselves. Maybe we should call them zombie prions.

So, when a bad (zombie) prion is introduced, it takes a while, but it can teach all the healthy prions to refold. How are bad prions introduced?

1.       Well, sometimes the prions just sporadically decide to change. That is really rare. But, when it happens, the animal will slowly form more and more bad prions until it becomes ill.

2.       Sometimes it is genetic. The bad prions are passed from parents to offspring.

The dairy cow in California has been found to have atypical BSE, which means she developed BSE in one of the above ways.

3.       BSE used to be passed between cows through feed. When animals are slaughtered, not every part can be eaten by humans. Some parts and pieces are converted to a product called meat and bone meal. Farmers used to feed meat and bone meal back to other cows as a source of protein. Bad prions were being spread that way in Britain in the 1980’s and 1990’s. When scientists realized that was happening, this practice was banned. So, the cow should not have gotten BSE that way.

What about other animals?

Cattle are obviously not the only animals that get this type of disease. Humans have similar diseases caused by bad prions known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Kuru (found in native people in New Guinea who practiced ritualistic canabalism), Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease, and Fatal Familial Insomnia. The bad prions in humans come from similar sources as cows; including genetic, sporadic, and from food (meat containg nervous tissue from cattle with BSE). Some people have gotten the disease through neurosurgery or eye implants.

Scientists think BSE in cattle may have originated from a disease in sheep called scrapie. Meat and bone meal from sheep fed to cattle contained bad sheep prions.

Deer and elk also get a disease called Chronic Wasting Disease. Big cats and exotic ungalates (antelopes etc.) contracted forms of spongiform encephalopathies during the height of the BSE epidemic in Europe.

The safegaurds in place to protect humans are also protecting these other species.

There are lots of websites with information about BSE.

My friend Ryan Goodman at I am agriculture proud has compiled several sites.

There is a new website called BSEinfo.org. Several of my links will take you there.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel to comment.

Sausage and Legislation.

What are two things that you don’t want to see being made? Sausage and legislation.

Thanks to CSPAN, CNN, MSNBC, and the 24-hour news cycle, we get to see legislation being made (or not made) all the time. So, we might as well learn about sausage, too.

One day last week, we spent all morning working in the meat lab making sausage, and I snapped a few pictures and decided it would make a fun and informative blog post.

First, why even bother making sausage?

We went to Germany a few years ago and
tasted several German sausages. Yum!

You mean, besides tastiness? Sausage making has been used for hundreds of years to preserve meat. When salt and spices are added, it takes it longer for meat to spoil. Some sausages are very dry and acidic (think summer sausage and pepperoni). Bacteria can’t survive such conditions. Some sausages have been smoked to preserve them. The heat and the compounds from the smoke both serve this purpose.

Today, sausage allows meat producers to add value to low-value cuts and to efficiently use every piece of the carcass. Old-time butchers used to say that when you harvested a pig, you used “everything but the squeal”. When you cut up a beef or pork carcass into steaks, chops, and roasts (and bacon, don’t forget bacon), there is always meat left over. The extra meat is ground through a grinder that cuts it into small pieces, making even the toughest meat fork-tender. I talked a little about this in the “not pink slime” and the “cooking burgers” posts. There is fat trim and lean trim.

Here are pictures of our fat trim and lean trim.

You could just grind it and mix it and cook it up, but how boring. Let’s make something more exciting!

The fat trim was about 50% fat and 50% lean and was made mostly from belly pieces that we decided not to make into bacon. The lean trim was about 93% lean and 7% fat. It was made from ham pieces and pork chops that we had removed samples from.  We mixed them together in a specific ratio to make sausage that was about 80% lean and 20% fat. You don’t want to make your sausage too fatty (for obvious reasons), but you also don’t want it to be too lean (it would be tough and dry).

Side notes:

***In the US, pork sausage can be 50% lean and 50% fat and still be labeled pork sausage. Generally, commercial sausage is not that fatty because consumers want a leaner product.

*** All of our sausage was made from pork skeletal meat. There are sausages made from liver or hearts or even salivary glands, but remember that if it’s in the sausage, it has to be on the label.

We put our ground pork in a big mixer and added the salt and spices. We buy most of our spices pre-mixed, but sometimes we mix our spices from a recipe.

This is where it gets cool.

Muscle is made up of protein. To do what proteins need to do in the body, they exist in long, folded-up chains. When you add salt to meat, the salt reacts with the protein and starts to dismantle it on a molecular level. As the proteins unfold, they start to stick to each other. They stick to everything, even water. We added water to the sausage in the mixer, and the protein soaked it up like a sponge.

Here is the meat in the mixer. This was an andouille recipe, with lots of paprika, so it was really red. See how the meat sticks to the side of the mixer. We used a little plastic scraper to scrape it off the sides.

 

This is the andouille on my glove. Looks yummy. See how it sticks to my glove.

Some of the sausage recipes include cheese. We can’t just use regular cheese. We have to use a special, high-melting temperature cheese. If the cheese melted, you wouldn’t be able to see it in the finished sausage

We added in the cheese as the sausage was mixing.

This is some Jalapeno cheese sausage. You can see the cheese and the jalapenos in the finished product. Yum! I didn’t take this picture. It was on the website of my late friend, Chris Raines, called Academic Abattoir. He has some great pictures of meat processing on that site.

Notice that Chris’ sausage was pink? Some of the sausage recipes call for the addition of cure (Sodium Nitrate). This gives the sausage it’s pretty pink color and cured flavor. Yum.

After mixing it for about 2 or 3 minutes, we grind the sausage again.

We always hold the meat in sanitized containers like this one. We call these ‘lugs.’ I don’t really know why. I guess because you have to lug the meat around in them.

Then we moved the sausage to the stuffer which is kinda like a vacuum in reverse. You fill it up with sausage and a piston pushes the sausage up through a tube, called a horn. The size of horn dictates how much sausage comes out at once.

This is a picture of some sausage in the stuffer.

We stuffed some of our sausage into chubs. This was the recipes we weren’t going to smoke, like breakfast sausage, some Italian sausage, and maple-flavored sausage.

This is another one of Chris' pictures.
These are sausage chubs.

We stuffed some of the sausage into natural casings. What are natural casings? Remember when I said that we use everything, but the squeal? The best sausage casings are made from pig intestines. They are washed and washed and washed and cleaned and treated and washed some more.

Before we stuffed them, we soaked them in water to hydrate them and flush them out one more time.

Here is what the casings look like in a package.

If you buy sausages in the store that have been stuffed into natural casings, it will say so on the package.

The casing goes over the horn, and the stuffer pushes the meat into the casing. It makes a long tube of meat.You can see the cheese in our sausage in this one.

I have a video of our meat lab manager stuffing the sausage into the natural casing.

After the sausage is stuffed in the casing, you have a long tube of sausage that looks like this.

If we left the sausage like this, it would be very hard to handle in getting it smoked and cut into serving-size pieces. So, we linked it.

To link the sausage, we pinched the sausage casing and twisted it. You have to alternate the direction that you twist the casing or you will untwist previous links. In big commercial sausage plants, they have machines that link the sausage as it comes out of the stuffer.

I have a video of linking, too.

This is what the linked sausage looked like. This was some of our jalapeno, cheese recipe.

We allowed it to rest in the cooler overnight. That gave the protein a little extra time to soak up the flavors of the spices.

The links all stay attached to each other until we cook it. When it’s cooked, the sausage links are hung over a metal stick and hung in the smoke house. In the smokehouse, they are cooked with heat and smoke is applied to give the sausage that nice smoky flavor.  Yum.

This is a picture of a couple of students at a processed meats workshop from about 5 years ago. They are not my students, but I think that they are now both gainfully employed. You can see the linked sausage ready to go in the smokehouse.

This is a picture of our finished product. It was quite tasty!

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sausage making. There are so many other neat things to talk about, like fermented sausage, different casings, hot dogs, canned sausage, pickled sausage, and other cooked meat specialties, but I guess that will all have to wait for another day’s post.

How would you like that cooked?

You order steak or a burger at a restaurant and the waiter or waitress asks, “how would you like that cooked?” What is your response? Well, if you are ordering a steak, there is no wrong answer to that question.  HOWEVER, you should ALWAYS order hamburgers or any other ground meat dish cooked to medium, medium well, or well done. I always order mine medium well.

Why should hamburgers be cooked to medium well, but steaks can be cooked to rare?

Today, I visited a Family and Consumer Science Class and demonstrated to them the answer to this question with play-doh. (I had to fight the little Daughter at the Meat Counter off the play doh.) I took some pictures to share on my blog.

When steaks are cut, there is a possibility that bacteria (disease-causing germs) could be on the surface of the steak. Steaks (and roasts, too) are whole-muscle cuts, meaning that they have been cut into serving- or cooking-size pieces, but the internal portion of the cut is still undisturbed. So, those bacteria are going to only be on the surface of the steak, and when you cook it, the surface will be the first to get hot and it will get the hottest. Any bacteria on the surface are going to be killed in the cooking process. The internal part of the meat does not have to get hot enough to kill any bacteria. So cooking steaks to rare or medium-rare is perfectly safe.

Do you like my little play-doh steaks? The green dots are the bacteria (only on the surface). The Daughter at the Meat Counter thought they were peas.

Ground beef is made from smaller cuts of beef that are trimmed away from the steaks and roasts. They are not lower quality or inferior in anyway other than they are too small or too tough to make good steaks are roasts. (Actually, which parts are cut into steaks and roasts and which parts are ground into hamburger is largely driven by ground beef demand. People like hamburgers.) These parts and pieces (trim) are kept in large containers and transported to the grinding room in the plant. All of these little pieces could have bacteria on their surfaces just like the steaks above. Several companies have researched different ways to treat the trim pieces to lower the bacterial count on the surface.

Here is my play-doh trim. It’s smaller and cut into irregular pieces. The bacteria are still only on the surface.

Here is where the difference is. The trim is ground. When meat is ground, it is pushed through a metal plate with small holes. Behind the plate, is a rotating knife that cuts the meat and allows it to be pushed through the plate.

This is not play-doh. I actually have pictures of real meat! Yay! You can see the round strands of ground beef coming through the plate.

Now, any of those bacteria that were on the surface of the meat are mixed up and spread all throughout the ground beef. When we make patties out of the ground beef, the bacteria could be on the surface or anywhere inside the patty.

These are some patties we made for a research project. Real bacteria don’t have color and you can’t see them on or in your patties.

It is easier to see the green, play-doh, bacteria mixed in with the red in my play-doh patty.

When I tore open my little play-doh patty, the students could see the green bacteria all throughout the patty.

So, when you cook patties, you should always cook them to 160 °F. USE A MEAT THERMOMETER. Make sure the thermometer is inserted into the middle of the patty.

When you order hamburgers at a restaurant, ALWAYS order them to medium or greater.

If you have other questions about food safety, I wrote a blog post about food safety in September.

A common conversation over steak dinners with meat scientists is how we order our steaks. I order my steaks cooked to medium-rare. Why, you ask? Well, there are two main types of protein in meat that affect tenderness, connective tissue (holds it all together) and myofibrillar (causes the muscle to contract). These two proteins react differently to exposure to heat. Connective tissue (collagen) protein dissolves to gelatin when it is heated, so it becomes more tender. The myofibrillar proteins harden as they are heated and become tougher. The optimum combination of collagen dissolving and myofibrillar hardening happens at about the temperature of medium-rare. Yum,

Some people don’t like the serumy (bloody) flavor associated with medium-rare and they want their steaks cooked longer (my mom). I guess that’s ok. If you like more well done steaks, I suggest you buy steaks with more marbling (USDA Choice, Prime, and Certified Angus Beef). The extra marbling protects the tenderness of those steaks when you cook them more.

Like I said, there is really no wrong answer to the question, “how would you like your steak cooked?”

However, you must cook hamburgers to medium (160°F) or greater.

We are not really talking about pink slime

What a lovely way to title a blog post! Pink slime! Wednesday night, ABC news reported a story about a product that is found in many ground beef products. They reported that a ‘whistle-blower’ USDA employee has come out telling the world about the evils of ‘Lean Beef Trimmings.’ This former USDA microbiologist, coined the term ‘pink slime.’ Celebrity chef, Jaime Oliver has falsely reported about this product in the past, too. He is so off-base and his approach is so theatrical, I couldn’t even bear to link to his video.  

Since the ABC report, other news agencies have picked it up and informed us that Lean Beef Trim is in school lunches and in lots of the beef in grocery stores. The videos and the story links have been lighting up my facebook and Twitter feeds for the better part of two days.  

First, what are ‘Lean Beef Trimmings?’

What the media is calling pink slime, we, in the industry, call “Lean Beef Trimmings” or “Lean Finely Textured Beef”. I’ve done research with the stuff, and I didn’t think it was slimy at all. This is a picture of the LBT that we used for a research project last fall.

It is kinda pink. News flash: meat is usually a pink or red color!  It doesn’t really look like the typical ground beef in the grocery store because it is ground up much finer than that. It is also shipped frozen. It may be shipped in big frozen blocks, but we ordered it in this chipped version so we could weigh it out more easily.

How is it made?

When cattle are harvested and cut into the beef steaks and roasts that we buy at the grocery store or that restaurants buy, pieces of lean and fat are trimmed away. Some of that lean and fat can be used to make ground beef and other sausage products. But, some of it is too fatty for ground beef and sausage. There is still lean protein in the fatty parts, but, before the Lean Beef Trimmings process came along, there was not really an economical way to remove the lean protein from the fatty trim. So it was thrown away.

Several years ago, a company called Beef Products Inc., patented a method to remove the lean tissue from the fatty trim. That way, the lean protein is not wasted and we are getting more protein out of every animal.

So, how does it work?

They start with fatty trim that is about 80% fat and 20% lean protein. These trimmings were sampled and tested by USDA for harmful bacteria before they arrived at the plant. The trimmings are heated it to about 100°F so that the fat will soften. Then, it is spun in a big mixing bowl machine to separate the lean from the fat.

The lean is then treated with a puff of ammonia gas and the ammonia reacts with the water on the product and converts it to ammonium hydroxide. This treatment has been one of the hot-button issues for this whole process. Ammonia gas and ammonium hydroxide are not the same as the house-hold cleaner, as a certain celebrity chef wants you to believe. The gas treatment raises the pH of the meat and destroys the bacteria on the meat.  (Dead bacteria can’t make your kids sick.) Essentially, the ammonium hydroxide makes the product even safer.

Ammonium hydroxide is found naturally in some foods and other foods, such as baked goods, cheeses, caramels, chocolate, gelatins and puddings, contain ammonium hydroxide. Here is a video interview with Dr. Gary Acuff from Texas A&M talking about the addition of ammonium hydroxide to lean beef trimmings.

So, it’s safe?

The final product is tested for deadly bacteria before it leaves the plant. Countless scientists agree that this product is safe and is produced using a safe process. This article lists several of those scientists and statements they made about the safety of this product. These are microbiologists from Texas A and M University, scientists from USDA, a former president of the National Consumer League, and the nation’s leading food borne illness attorney.

What products contain LBT?

When LBT is made, it contains 95% lean protein or greater. So, it is added to ground beef to increase the lean percentage. Because of its fine texture, it can only be added in a small percentage or it will affect the texture of the ground beef. ABC reported that 70% of ground beef in grocery stores contain LBT. So far, I haven’t been able to confirm or deny that number. I couldn’t find the link to cite, but I believe that McDonald’s stopped using LBT because the finely textured properties didn’t work in their beef.

Is it on the label?

No. It is 100% beef. Lean Beef Trimmings is not listed as a separate ingredient on the label.

Obviously, I am not the only person writing about this. There are several other blogs and articles to read.

The American Meat Institute has a list of questions and answers about the process. My new twitter friend, Travis Arp, a graduate student at Colorado State, has seen the product being made and writes about it in this blog post. (New additions on Monday, March 12, 2012 - pinkslimeisamyth.com and a blog entitled Common Sense Agriculture)Beef Products Inc. has issued a statement about all the recent publicity. And, of course there is the Meat Myth Crushers video. The list could go on and on.

3-28-12amendment: Since I posted this, several more websites and articles have beenposted telling the real story about Lean Beef Trimmings, ammonium hydroxide,and the safety of this product. I felt like I needed to add them to this post.

A video about themisrepresentation by Jaime Oliver.
A videoabout the use of ammonia in foods.
A interviewwith Dr. Thomas Powell, Executive Director of the American Meat ScienceAssociation (a personal friend of mine). This is a great explanation of thisproduct.
A statement fromthe American Meat Institute President, J. Patrick Boyle.
A blogpost by agriculture advocate, Trent Loos. (One huge step backwards formankind.)
Several websitelinks are available on the website beefisbeef.com.
A heart-wrenchingarticle by Nancy Donley, president of STOP food borne illness. Her onlychild, Alex, died from kidney failure after consuming hamburger contaminated E.coli O157:H7.

Please reador watch some of these resources and share the truth with people you know.

Here is the bottom line on my thoughts about Lean Beef Trimmings.

Yes, it is safe. It is treated to kill bacteria.

Yes, it is wholesome. It is protein, that, without this process, we would not have access to.

Yes, I would feed it to my family. I do.




Disclaimer – the temperature and the ammonium hydroxide gas treatment are specific to the Lean Beef Trim product from one company. Other, similar products are also made, using similar processes.