make pork tough. If you salt it, it will be too tough.” This explanation seemed to have more fishiness than pork about it. I’ve been putting salt on my pork chops for more than 50 years, and never noticed it making them tough.
Store employees may be reluctant to talk to reporters, or even ordinary shoppers, and customer service people may not want to alarm consumers, but the Internet tells all. Click on the Google search engine and type in the terms “pre-seasoned meat,” or “moistureenhanced meat,” and the real story comes clear. That’s what I did.
A SPREADING TREND
A website called the Virtual Weber Bullet explained the phenomenon succinctly:
Enhanced meat is becoming more and more popular in the United States. This trend is well established with pork and poultry and is spreading to beef products.…
Enhanced meat can be defined as fresh, whole muscle meat that has been injected with a solution of water and other ingredients that may include salt, phosphates, antioxidants, and flavorings. Regular meat can be defined as fresh, whole muscle meat that has not been injected or marinated.…
The problem isn’t so much enhanced meat as a concept, but that it’s becoming more difficult to buy certain fresh meat products in their regular versions–and fresh, natural, conventional meat is what most barbeque enthusiasts are looking for. Fresh pork is the best example of this trend. In some supermarkets, most fresh pork products, including spare and loin back ribs, butts, picnics and loins, are available only as an enhanced pork product. The same cuts of meat are not offered in their regular versions. 4
You and I, in short, have no choice. The choice has been made for us.
Whether we like it or not, we are obliged to accept whatever the meat packer and supermarket chain have decided is the way our meat ought to be flavored. Matters of personal taste are ignored. Like clothes off a discount department store rack, “one size fits all,” and we can take it or leave it. If you like your meat with less pepper or salt than the chain has decided you should have, too bad. Big Brother knows best. Learn to love it.
And if your doctor has put you on a low- or no-salt diet due to high blood pressure or risk of heart disease, no matter. The corporate chain store has decreed that you must eat salt–or stop eating meat altogether. And bugger your health.
Die, or become a vegetarian.
There are, of course, some merits to the idea of being vegetarian. The majority Hindu population of India have been vegetarian for centuries and seem none the worse for it. They get their protein from other sources. But, damn it all, I’d like such a thing to be my choice, not the decision of some crew of corporate suits sitting in a boardroom somewhere with their accountants and advertising men and making up my mind for me! I’ll wager most Americans and Canadians, if they’d take the trouble to stop and think about it, would agree.
The fact is, I like pork chops. I like them flavored to my own taste, not to someone else’s. And I don’t want to be forced to stop eating them altogether if I should unexpectedly develop heart problems. And what about those other ingredients, “phosphates, antioxidants and flavorings”? What if I’m allergic to one of them? Will it even be listed on the package label to warn me? Under the current supermarket regime, not likely.
And why are meat packers and supermarket chains switching to “enhanced” meats? The Virtual Weber Bullet site gives a number of reasons, but the most persuasive (given the added expense and complication for the packer of installing injection heads, pressure controls, filters, flexible needle mounts, and separate shut-off controls for each injection needle used in the enhancement process) seems to be “increased profitability”:
By “adding value” to meat by enhancing it, meat producers can charge more for their products and achieve higher profits. Also, by solving the problems of color retention and purge, enhanced meat facilitates the trend toward case-ready meat—meat that is butchered and packaged at the meat packing plant so that it’s ready for display and sale in retail stores. Case-ready meat is more profitable for meat producers and for retailers, and it represents the future of meat in America—and the demise of your local butcher. 5
Nor is meat the only food product in which salt might be an issue. For decades, fast food retailers like McDonald’s have served french fries with a liberal dose of sodium chloride. But recently, the international chain has adopted a new stance, agreeing to remove large quantities of salt from its products in Britain, including from the oil its fries are prepared in.6 Each serving of burgers, ketchup, or fries will have up to 23 percent less salt than in the past.
WITCHES’ BREW
Moisture-enhanced and pre-seasoned meat products may seem a highhanded, profit-motivated intrusion on consumer independence, irritating to anyone who values his or her gastronomical autonomy. But, compared to what else is out there, they are relatively benign.
A mere pinch of salt, so to speak.
Today’s mass-market foods contain far worse, with the general rule being that the more highly processed the food product, the wider the variety of hard-to-pronounce compounds inside it. In actuality, what we are increasingly being forced to accept as “normal” fare includes a witches’ brew that would make Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, cackling over their cauldron of “double, double toil and trouble,” blanche.
The list of additives, pollutants, adulterants, and poisons is so long, and due to so many different causes, that no single explanation can cover them, or rank their importance. Perhaps the best method is the one Hollywood uses to list the stars in a multi-star epic–alphabetical order. Here are some of the “star” ingredients in the stuff that is becoming our food.
ACRYLAMIDE The organic chemical compound acrylamide, a derivative of acrylic acid (CH2=CHCOOH) used industrially to make adhesives and textiles, wasn’t thought of as a problem in food until April 2002. That year, Swedish scientists studying a group of tunnel workers who had been accidentally exposed to the compound on the job, revealed that they’d found high acrylamide levels not only in the red blood cells of the exposed workers, but also in people who hadn’t been exposed.
The source for the latter group was traced to their food.7
Because acrylamide had been identified earlier by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a probable cancer-causing agent, the Swedish results caused an international stir, and a hunt for an explanation of how the chemical got into the food chain.
The hunt didn’t take long. Acrylamide was found in varying levels in potato chips, French fries, crackers, breakfast cereals, and other processed foods whose manufacture includes heating, especially frying or baking. Scientists deduced they were formed by the amino acid asparagine and glucose sugar during the heating process.
Will this chemical “starlet” just breaking onto the scene prove a truly dangerous contaminant? The scientific jury is still out. Although acrylamide in high doses has been proven to cause genetic mutations in mice that lead to cancer, the level of the chemical in the average human’s body at present is less than that in the lab mice. As the Washington Post reported:
So far, officials say, they have not found acrylamide risks great enough to recommend that consumers avoid any groups
