Grill Maestro

The meat industry has begun using carbon monoxide to treat their meat in order to preserve its bright pink color for weeks. That’s right, the same colorless, odorless, and extremely dangerous gas that could potentially kill you if inhaled in a high enough quantity. Though harmless in the quantities used in meat, it stinks (haha!) of fraud. The meat industry calls it a “pigment fixative” because it preserves that nice pink color and it’s going to save the $1b lost by the industry when they throw out otherwise good meat simply because it looks unappealing. When a lot of consumers, myself included, rely on this color to visually detect the level of freshness, it’s important that meat that has been treated be required to indicate its been treated.

The whole story is documented pretty well in a Washington Post article and I see the point for both sides, so why not just label the meat as carbon monoxide treated? I suppose it’s because people associate carbon monoxide with “bad” and are less likely to purchase “treated” meats.

Personally? I think the practice is deceptive unless you label the meat so consumers know. Also, given that there is a date on the meat package itself, I think that consumers are aware that they should be looking at the date and not the color to truly determine freshness anyway. Lastly, I think this point near the =middle of the article is certainly worth noting:

…European Union has banned the use of carbon monoxide as a color stabilizer in meat and fish. A December 2001 report from the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Food concluded that the gas (whose chemical abbreviation is “CO”) did not pose a risk as long as food was kept cold enough during storage and transport to prevent microbial growth. But should the meat become inadvertently warmer at some point, it warned, “the presence of CO may mask visual evidence of spoilage.”

Interesting.