Spiked meat sets off alarms

Here's an attention-grabbing opening:

Picture two steaks on a grocer's shelf, each hermetically sealed in clear plastic wrap. One is bright pink, rimmed with a crescent of pearly white fat. The other is brown, its fat the color of a smoker's teeth.

Which do you reach for?

The meat industry knows the answer, which is why it has quietly begun to spike meat packages with carbon monoxide.

Is there anyone reading this that thinks the meat industry really cares about customers more than profits?

...critics are challenging the Food and Drug Administration and the nation's powerful meat industry, saying the agency violated its own rules by allowing the practice without a formal evaluation of its impact on consumer safety.

If the meat industry has its way, meat will be even more deceptive a product than it already is:

Tyson Foods, for example -- one of three meat packagers that has received a green light from the FDA to use carbon monoxide -- just opened a $100 million plant in Texas to churn out more case-ready "modified atmosphere" packaged meats, Kay said.

No one knows how much carbon-monoxide-treated meat is being sold; the companies involved are privately held or keep that information secret. But the potential is seen as great. The new technology "will finally make this the case-ready revolution, rather than the case-ready evolution," said Mark Klein, director of communications for Cargill's meat business.

Man, these guys really skeeve me out. Some of 'em make me laugh, too, what with names like Bucky:

Bucky Gwartney, executive director for research and knowledge management for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, chafes at the idea that the industry is trying to fool consumers.

"It would be ludicrous for a company to adopt a process that would undermine what we all want, which is to assure that food is safe," Gwartney said.

How does adopting the CO process assure food is safe? It merely assures greater profits because less meat is thrown out. It really blows my mind how easy it is for the meat industry to constantly cast themselves as the benefactors of animals and humans, when they make it clear with their own words and quarterly reports that their primary motive is profit. I mean easy in the sense that they slip into this PR framing so naturally that I think they really have begun to believe what they're saying, even though it's clearly in direct contradiction with other things they say in the media. And I also mean easy in the sense that so many consumers don't catch this stuff and just let them off the hook. Someone needs to hold a candle up to this craziness.

Categories: meat freshness | meat industry