| Don’t Judge a Steak by Its Color |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 07 April 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Have you ever avoided meat in the grocery store that was “discolored”? Maybe it was darkening or developing a pearlescent sheen - and you reached behind it for the next Styrofoam package that had glowing red meat? Turns out, color is not a good freshness detector in meat. That bright red meat that we associate with freshness is often artificially prolonged with the addition of carbon monoxide. As if our meat didn’t have a high enough carbon footprint, with the costs of land use, processing and transportation, now it's topped off with a dollop of extra greenhouse gas and human toxins. Carbon monoxide can impersonate oxygen so well that the hemoglobin in our cells pick it up instead of oxygen. The decrease in pure oxygen tires our body out, and can cause irreparable brain damage and death at relatively low concentrations. The myoglobin in meat will also pick carbon monoxide up, even post-mortem, extending the decomposition process. But it does make meat red longer! Ugh. Have we told you how much we love our local farmers? So far, the FDA has been willing to look the other way on regulation of this “freshness-extender." But in this all-too typical absence of FDA regulation, the possible good news is that some private companies are now considering labelling their meat as "carbon monoxide free" to inform consumers.
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It's true what our moms said...we are what we eat. In fact, it's truer than they thought. What I eat doesn't just affect me anymore, it affects all of us.
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