Chilling methods could change meat tenderness

Chilling methods could change meat tenderness
Science Daily is reporting that  a recent study is showing that "blast chilling" of pork, ("Blast chilling is a rapid cooling of the muscles for at least 45 minutes at less than negative ten degrees Fahrenheit," said Steven Shackelford of USMARC.) leads to a tougher meat after it was removed from storage. The reason pork was used is that pigs are particularly susceptible to stress reactions on the kill line. John Barlow, in Everything But The Squeal points out that in Spain, pigs are killed using carbon monoxide, in order to minimize stress reactions. But then, Spain produces the finest ham in the world (the  jambon iberico negro), and North America produces, well, lots of cheap pork.

The Death of "Pink Slime"

As I reported earlier in my Jamie Oliver post, the makers of "finely textured lean ground beef" have had a pretty difficult couple of weeks. From Gerald Zirnstein (a USDA microbiologist) coining the phrase in 2002, to Kit Foshee bringing his concerns to GAP (the Government Accountability Project) and their Food Integrity Campaign in 2008, and the closing of three of four plants by Beef Products International, and the news that AFA Foods have entered Chapter 11 because of the current storm this week, things have moved pretty fast in the last while.

Beef by-products undergoing processing at a BPI plant. Image sourced: Chicago Tribune

The idea of ammoniating beef to kill e. coli bacteria allowed mechanically separated beef to enter the human food chain--before that it was only approved for use in pet foods. Things started to go off the rails when it was claimed that ammoniated beef trimmings would transmit this e. coli-killing ability to ground beef it was mixed with-- a claim that was never tested.
Ammoniating beef was found to be so effective that, in 2007, "exempt from routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public." From the beginning, finely textured lean ground beef was seen as both a cheap extender of ground beef (ground beef could conatain up to 15% ftl ground beef without any requirement to list it as an ingredient), and as a way of ensuring that the traditional ground beef was somehow protected against e. coli contamination.The problem was that, at the concentrations required by the USDA, ground beef mixed with ammoniated ground beef smelled bad. Bad enough that shipments of it were occasionally returned as having been spoiled during transport, when in fact they just smelled that way.
Ammonia concentrations were reduced to meet these concerns--thus negating both the ammmoniated beef's protection from e. coli and the alleged "knock-on" effect of protecting the meat it was mixed with.It should be noted, however, that no case of e. coli contamination has been traced back to BPI's ammoniated beef, although there have been several e. coli-related ground beef recalls in the last decade.
Thankfully, ammonia has never been approved as a treatment method for ground meat in Canada, nor is it supposed to be imported (although there seems to be some fuzzy areas around the importation rule, with Health Canada Canada allowing finely textured meat to be "used in the preparation of ground meat" and "identified as ground meat" under certain conditions). With pretty much every major fast food operation in the US using pre-made hamburger patties buying ground beef with the allowed 15% of ammoniated beef, one is left to wonder if any Canadian operation ended up using US-made patties.
Ammonia isn't the only compound used in food processing. For example, we've seen a rise in the use of cellulose as a food extender in the last while, and a report on food fraud has just been published in the April Journal of Food Science (not available online, but there's a press report). In fact, there's an entire site dedicated to food fraud reporting.  On the USDA website, you can get a list of the various chemicals used in industrial food production (links to a pdf). I wish I could say that it was as easy to find something similar on the CFIA website, but it's not. The CFIA websiteseems to be a bit more producer-friendly and a little less consumer-friendly. On the plus side though, there is a dictionary of food additives, available both online and as a downloadable pdf, a guide to meat cuts and the words used on packaging, and some basic food-handling tips.

This Little Piggie

Was dubbed the Enviropig by researchers at Ontario's University of Guelph.

From the University of Guelph website

 It was developed (when it's a genetically modified organism, can you really use the word "bred"?) in 1999 to deal with the problem of too much phosphorus in swine manure spread on fields. Phosphorus is linked to massive, river-choking, algal blooms, and run-off from manure-treated fields have been point sources for phosphorus.
Of course, this is only a problem when you have too much swine manure to spread--typically a problem with industrial scale hog rearing operations. These operations can house upwards of 500,000 hogs on one site. When the Enviropig (dubbed "Frankenswine" by detractors) was developed, one of the creators enthused that industrial hog operations would be able to support twice the hogs on the same footprint of land. Oh, and with no increase in phosphorus run-off.
This is typical of factory farming; Each problem caused by industrial farming practice has to have a technological solution that allows the same type of farming to continue. That the problem might be the raising of too damn many hogs on to small a space is never addressed.
That there are feed additives that can reduce swine manure phosphorus levels are also unacceptable as they would raise the cost per carcass (according to the Globe and Mail article) by ~$1.70Can. The money put into developing Enviropig, on the other hand, would be diffused over millions of hogs per year. But the public never came on board with eating GMO animals. Quoted in the Toronto Star,

Cecil Forsberg, an emeritus professor of molecular and cellular biology at the university who was in charge of the project, said he agreed with the decision.
When the first such pig was created in 1999, he said, “I had the feeling in seven or eight or nine years that transgenic animals probably would be acceptable. But I was wrong. It’s time to stop the program until the rest of the world catches up,” he said. “And it is going to catch up.”

 I'm not convinced that we will "catch up." I suspect that the violent swings of global climate change over the next 20 years will give us a lot more to worry about than how much pig we have to eat. The question is more "will we be able to acquire enough calories to maintain life?" Industrial farming may be at it's historical high-water mark.

Jamie Oliver

I kind of have to admit, I love this guy. He has leveraged his celebrity into not more celebrity, but into actual conciousness raising, actual change. His British School Dinners series made significant changes to the way English children eat at school. When it was shown on the food network here in Canada, it sparked the formation of dozens of groups across the country. Engaged activist parents who began to pay attention to food at school.
Then Jamie took on school food in the USA with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. While he didn't have the effect he'd hoped for, what with being turned away from 75 LA school districts when he offered them an opportunity for a cafeteria makeover. America really didn't want anyone to know what kind of crap they were feeding their kids in school. But then this happened:




Jamie showed off the "pink slime" or "finely textured lean ground beef" used as a filler product in commercial ground beef. A USDA study shows that pink slime is used in about 70% of all commercially made ground beef in the US.
Well, things happened. Things like this report from ABC News on 21 March 2012:





Safeway, the #2 supermarket chain in the US is now refusing to stock ground beef containing the filler.That's success. In Colorado, parents have pushed school districts to reject beef using the filler. That's success.
And back in the UK, The Guardian reports that a study published in The Journal of Health Economics  shows:

Jamie Oliver's healthy school dinners continue to produce a marked improvement in national curriculum test results five years after the chef first launched his campaign, according to research.
A study by academics shows children eating the healthier lunches introduced by the TV chef do far better in tests.
Absenteeism from sickness was also said to have dropped by around 14%.
And it is claimed that a child eating the healthier food will earn between £2,103 and £5,476 more over their lifetimes due to their improved literacy.

So you get why I love this guy? Impact. And a positive impact at that.  And it's exactly this kind of impact that has caused industrial food to pursue "ag gag" bills in various state legislatures in the US.Because if you don't know about it, they can keep doing it--no matter what "it" is.

UPDATE: Read a report that said that three of Beef Products Inc.'s four factories producing "pink slime" have been closed for 60 days, pending a review of demand.  The closure may be permanent. Like I said, impact.

UPDATE II: Reuters is reporting that  

Ground beef processor AFA Foods filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, citing the impact of the uproar over a meat filler dubbed "pink slime" by critics.

The Daily Mail Online is headlining that

'Pink slime' company files for bankruptcy amid controversy over the ammonia treated filler

Jamie Oliver + social media = Chapter 11 proceedings.

I'm guessing that for the company's managers this was like being punched by Mike Tyson with no warning. Can't say that I'm feeling all that concerned for them, although this will affect 650 workers in multiple plants. Defenders, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, seen here chowing down on a "pink slime burger"

(an AP photo that runs with the Daily Mail Online article) claim that the substance was "safe to eat." Don't know that anyone was saying it was "unsafe to eat,"  just that we didn't want to eat the damned stuff. And because it was labelled "finely textured lean ground beef" rather than "ammonia-treated mechanically recovered waste meat-like substance" in general people got a bit perturbed. Interesting that the University of Guelph has chosen today to announce that it will no longer be pursuing research on the "enviro-pig," a pig designed to better withstand the industrial farm conditions under which it would be raised.

I think I'll end where we were a year ago, with one of the great jeramiads about industrial food ever written--in this case by Anthony Bourdain in Medium Raw:

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you're making a hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.
I don't think that's asking a lot--and I don't ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you're putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as "meat."

Update III
Over at the Food Integrity Campaign, there's a really nifty timeline of the "pink slime" issue, from it's beginings to the almost total rejection of the product in this past week.  Also, back in 2009, the New York Times ran an excellent article (it must have been, it won awards) about the use of ammoniated beef and the problems that were apparent with the product even then.
You know, I started out wanting to talk about a chef who has leveraged his celebrity to try and do some good in the world. I really didn't see this explosion coming, thinking it was just one more example of the crap we're stuck with eating ,and that until there was a revolution we would continue to be stuck with eating. But, man, did this thing ever achieve critical mass in a hurry!

Buying Food: The Motion Picture

Welcome to 1950! This lovely Young Americans film (from archive.org, a site you really should be familiar with) details how to spend your time and money wisely while in a grocery store. Yes, there are the unintentionally funny moments, but the basic information is still pretty good.  Avoid impulse buys, understand labels, buy bulk according to what you can use and store, these aren't bad lessons for any of us to take away from this short film.
One of the things that fascinates me is that this film talks about the difference between three different grades of food available for sale. To see cheaper Grade "C" tomatoes for sale--"just as nuitritious, but more broken up"--just made me think "Wow! Cheaper tomatoes for saucing!"
My mother grew up on this type of home economics information, and you could see how it informed her cooking for the rest of her life. There were a lot of less expensive cuts of meat prepared according to recipes from magazines and cheap cookbooks over the years. (I wish I had her copy of the Mennonite Cookbook from back in the early sixties!) Fish was only prepared when we caught it or when her wise-ass son (yes, me) stumbled on a recipe he wanted to try. Roasts were reserved for Sunday or special occasions. Ground beef was a staple.
Growing up this way has given me a lasting appreciation for what I call "subsistence" or "Bachelor" cooking; the kind of cooking done with a mix of prepared, frozen, and fresh ingredients. Ramen noodles with a handful of frozen diced veg tossed in. 15-minute chili made from canned beans, both spiced and plain. Meatloaf that's more filler than meat, but still feeds you two or three times. Lord knows, I respect Jamie Oliver, but  it's not always possible to do the best you can in the kitchen. The goal, as I see it, is to try and do better than takeaway more often than not, and for less money.
Food is a lot of things; cultural signifier, social lubricant, palate tickler. But cooking happens three times a day, 365 days a year, and sometimes it's just a chore you have to do when you're tired and hungry. And that's a good reason to have a well-stocked pantry for those days when you just want to eat and sleep.

Blueberries and the Bigger Question

     I would have preferred to  have embedded this, but there you go. It is worth watching, though.
Blueberries faked in cereals, muffins, bagels and other food products - Food Investigations - NaturalNews.tv
     The point of the piece is pretty good; you may think you know what you're buying, but you really don't. Of course, glancing at the ingredients list would have told you that. Or the fact that you're already buying a processed food-like substance rather than, you know, food. But nevertheless, there is a lot of marketing money being spent to ensure that you are mislead about what it really is that you're buying.
     This is the reason that Michael Pollan and others suggest that you simply skip the inside of your local supermarket. If you must shop there, minimize the damage by shopping the outer edges rather than the centre shelving. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't buy it.
     This does show one of the reasons that farmers are getting less than ever of each food dollar spent these days: most of the "food" being sold isn't food, but manufactured edible food like products. And thankfully, vegetables are still vegetables, fruit is still fruit, and we can still recognize them as such.