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Pam’s Commentary
February 20th, 2006
www.pamkilleen.com
RE: FDA is urged to ban meat
treated with carbon monoxide (story below my commentary)
Treating meat with carbon monoxide
is yet another attempt for the factory food industry to
“duct tape” the problems they are having with their
food. According to this article, carbon monoxide will
help keep the meat from spoiling and improve its color.
I wonder if the people who are behind promoting this
technology have they ever seen or eaten real meat – meat
from local farms where the cows are raised on pasture.
It has beautiful color and is higher in many nutrients
such as anti-oxidants. For obvious reasons, this article
doesn’t propose this as the real solution to the
problems they are faced with in the meat industry.
One band-aid solution that began
about 100 years ago is called pasteurization. They
really should have just changed what the cows were
eating, rather than destroying the milk by pasteurizing
it. Cows were being fed too much grain which was sold as
a byproduct of the distillery industry. The more grain a
cow eats, the “sicker” the milk will be – so will its
meat. Through good PR, pasteurization won out as the
solution to their problem. Of course, at the time, they
made it look like they were doing us a favor. Cows
should be outside, eating grass. They are much healthier
than confined grain-fed cows.
BigFood is out to make big profits;
they’re not interesting in providing us with real food.
It’s up to the consumer to question the use of
irradiation or carbon monoxide. Look deeper than the
“spin” they use to push these types of technology.
Ironically, they’d like us to believe that they’re
technological “advances”. What a joke!
I notice a shift happening.
Consumers are starting to question the way animals are
raised and how our food is produced. They are also
starting to doubt the media and science behind the
promotion of genetically engineered foods, irradiation,
aspartame, MSG etc…I’m certain that consumers will also
question this new process of treating meat with carbon
monoxide. Don’t be fooled by their scare tactics and
their attempts to distract you from learning other
solutions. In this case, the solution is to find locally
produced meat, from grassfed cows, go to
www.westonaprice.org or
www.themeatrix.com.
FDA is urged to ban treated
meat
Carbon monoxide helps food
look fresh longer, but safety debated
By Rick Weiss
Updated: 4:07 a.m. ET Feb. 20, 2006
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.
The gas, harmless to health at
the levels being used, gives meat a bright pink color
that lasts weeks. The hope is that it will save the
industry much of the $1 billion it says it loses
annually from having to discount or discard meat that is
reasonably fresh and perfectly safe but no longer
pretty.
But the growing use of carbon
monoxide as a "pigment fixative" is alarming consumer
advocates and others who say it deceives shoppers who
depend on color to help them avoid spoiled meat. Those
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.
"This meat stays red and stays
red and stays red," said Don Berdahl, vice president and
laboratory director at Kalsec Foods in Kalamazoo, Mich.,
a maker of natural food extracts that has petitioned the
FDA to ban the practice.
If nothing else, Berdahl and
others say, carbon-monoxide-treated meat should be
labeled so consumers will know not to trust their eyes.
'Other signs' meat is
spoiled
The legal offensive has the meat industry seeing
red. Officials deny their foes' claim that carbon
monoxide is a "colorant" -- a category that would
require a full FDA review -- saying it helps meat retain
its naturally red color.
Besides, industry
representatives say, color is a poor indicator of
freshness as meat turns brown from exposure to oxygen
long before it goes bad.
"When a product reaches the
point of spoilage, there will be other signs that will
be evidenced -- for example odor, slime formation and a
bulging package -- so the product will not smell or look
right," said Ann Boeckman, a lawyer with the Washington
law firm Hogan & Hartson. It represents Precept Foods
LLC, a joint venture between Cargill Meat Solutions
Corp. and Hormel Foods Corp. that helped pioneer the
technology.
Much is at stake. The U.S.
market in "case ready" meats -- those packaged
immediately after slaughter, eliminating the need for
butchers at grocery stores -- is approaching $10 billion
and growing, said Steve Kay of Cattle Buyers Weekly,
which tracks the industry from Petaluma, Calif. 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.
It is a revolution some want
stopped in its tracks.
"We feel it's a huge consumer
right-to-know issue," said Donna Rosenbaum of Safe
Tables Our Priority, an advocacy group in Burlington,
Vt., created after four children died and hundreds
became sick after eating tainted hamburgers from Jack in
the Box restaurants in 1992 and 1993. Last month, the
Burlington group and the Consumer Federation of America
wrote to the FDA in support of a ban.
At the core of the issue is how
the FDA has assessed companies' requests to use carbon
monoxide in their packaging.
It started about five years
ago, when Pactiv Corp. of Lake Forest, Ill., urged the
FDA to declare the approach "generally recognized as
safe," or GRAS -- a regulatory category that allows a
firm to proceed with its plans without public review or
formal agency "approval."
The FDA told Pactiv in 2002 it
had no argument with the proposal. In 2004, Precept
Foods received a similar letter, and recently Tyson did
as well.
The FDA has also deemed carbon
monoxide GRAS for keeping tuna looking fresh.
A changing market
Kalsec acknowledges having an economic interest in
fighting the practice. The company sells extracts of
rosemary and other natural essences that help block the
oxidation that turns meat brown. Its products have
allowed meat packagers to use high-oxygen atmospheres in
sealed packages to maintain freshness without having to
worry about browning.
That is a market that could
largely disappear as packagers switch to low-oxygen
atmospheres with carbon monoxide -- an approach that
keeps meat looking red not just longer, but almost
indefinitely.
But Kalsec, and the consumer
advocates who have signed on to the fight, say it is not
just the market in extracts that is at risk.
They note that the 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."
How is it, Berdahl and others
ask, that something can be deemed "generally recognized
as safe" when there is enough scientific debate over the
issue to warrant a ban in Europe?
"I just picture a refrigerator
truck breaking down in Arizona and sitting there for an
afternoon. Then, 'Hey, we got it repaired and nobody
knows the difference,' and there you go."
Opponents also say the FDA was
wrong to consider carbon monoxide a color fixative
rather than a color additive -- a crucial decision
because additives must pass a rigorous FDA review. They
note that freshly cut meat looks purplish red, and that
the addition of carbon monoxide -- which binds to a
muscle protein called myoglobin -- turns it irreversibly
pink.
What is deceptive?
Proponents of the gas counter that meat turns from
purple to red just from sitting in air, and that CO
prevents the next step, in which meats turn brown. They
also say consumers should pay attention to "sell or
freeze by" dates as the best indicator of freshness.
George H. Pauli, associate
director for science and policy in the FDA's Office of
Food Additive Safety, defended the agency's decisions.
"In general, statute says you cannot use [substances] in
a deceptive manner, and the question is what is a
deceptive manner," Pauli said.
He emphasized that the agency
has never formally approved the gas's use, but rather
looked at information provided by the companies and
decided not to object.
"We said, 'Thank you, you've
helped inform us,' " Pauli said.
That is what has opponents most
upset.
"The FDA should not have
accepted carbon monoxide in meat without doing its own
independent evaluation of the safety implications,"
Elizabeth Campbell, former head of the FDA's office of
food labeling, wrote in a statement released in
November.
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. "Maybe it needs to be more transparent
and public," he acknowledged. "If that's what we need to
do, we'll probably do that as an industry."
Research editor Lucy
Shackelford contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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