The United States news media is
moving on from pink slime to meat glue, but this time the industry is
responding much faster.
The American Meat Institute is saying
there is nothing wrong with two meat binders - transglutaminase (TG) and beef
fibrin (BF).
The institute hosted a news
conference to respond after critics said it’s misleading for meat packers to
use the products to stick pieces together so they look like higher-priced cuts,
such as filet mignon.
It has, however, been a decades-old
practice to stick together pieces of, for example, ham to make a packaged
product that looks like whole ham. Even J.M. Schneider Inc., when it was still
a family-owned company proud of its reputation for quality, eventually
succumbed to competitive pressure to adopt the practice in the 1990s.
Representatives of the two most
common binding products – Activa and Fibrimex – joined Mark D. Dopp, senior
vice president of regulatory affairs and general counsel for the American Meat
Institute and Dana Hanson, extension meat scientist at North Carolina State
University, on the media call.
They noted that the binders are the
same as natural meat ingredients and when challenged about why they don’t make
the practice plain on labels, said it’s no different than a soup company
failing to declare everything it puts into vegetable soup.
