Still Eating Meat? This’ll Put You Off Your Feedlot

Being a vegetarian, meat headlines always leave me a little unsettled. Still, the news has been particularly bad lately.

First we find out American meat packers are trying to package the stuff in carbon monoxide gas in order to keep it looking � and looking only � fresher longer. The practice was already banned by the European Union.

The normally poisonous gas keeps red meat red no matter how old it gets, instead of allowing it to turn that rainbow-sheened gray that would normally be part of the decomposing process. Consumers, we are told, will indirectly save money because instead of grocery stores having to dispose of animal parts and pieces when they’re edible but revolting, now they can keep right on selling until that cow’s been dead…a real long time. The results aren’t quite as planned.

At issue is the growing practice of spiking sealed packages of meat with small doses of carbon monoxide. The gas…can keep meat looking bright red and fresh even as it spoils…

The July issue of Consumer Reports…took bacterial counts on 10 samples of locally purchased ground beef and steaks that had been treated with the gas. All the meat looked red, but two had spoiled by their “use or freeze by” dates and one “was on the brink of spoilage” one day before its stamped date.

Other studies showed that even if the stuff looked great in the package, you better stand back when you open it up.

In the second Texas Tech study, J. Chance Brooks, an assistant professor of meat science, asked a panel of trained sniffers to judge the freshness of meat of various ages that had been stored in different packaging systems. He concluded that consumers would not be deceived into eating spoiled meat that had been kept red by carbon monoxide because it, too, has a distinctive smell when it spoils.

“You cannot mask odor,” Brooks said.

Now things are getting even weirder. In order to keep pre-cooked meat “fresher” longer, they want to spray it with viruses. I’m not making this up.

The combination of six viruses is designed to be sprayed on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products, including sliced ham and turkey, said John Vazzana, president and chief executive officer of manufacturer Intralytix Inc.

The special viruses, called bacteriophages, are meant to kill strains of the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium, the Food and Drug Administration said in declaring it safe to use on ready-to-eat meats prior to their packaging.

Consumers won’t be aware that meat and poultry products have been treated with the spray…

Intralytix, based in Baltimore, first petitioned the FDA in 2002 to allow the viruses to be used as a food additive. It has since licensed the product to a multinational company, which intends to market it worldwide…

Without even mentioning heart disease and mad cow, it’s very hard to make a case that eating animals is healthy but it’s Big Business.

Producing 1 pound of feedlot beef requires 7 pounds of feed grain, which takes 7000 pounds of water to grow…and [produces] 12 pounds of livestock feces and other pollutants…Livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do…and it has been responsible for massive fish kills and out-breaks of disease such as pfisteria. Almost 80% of all U.S. farms drain into one single body of water�the Mississippi River.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Look, I want everyone — especially me — to eat what they want. But if you’ve never really considered not participating in the practice of meat eating, just know that despite what they want you to think, it is optional.

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