SEARCH
Pink Slime and Transglutaminase: Is There Meat Glue in Your Food?
re: The Epoch Times
Yuck.
Is There Meat Glue in Your Food?
2023-08-18. Emphasis added.
For example, Wylie Dufresne, who was both chef and owner of the super-pricy Manhattan eatery wd~50 (which closed in 2014), was quoted in Meat Paper as saying he had “concocted all manner of playful and bizarre food products with meat glue, including shrimp spaghetti, which he made by mixing salt, cayenne, deveined shrimp, and meat glue in a blender.”
“Meat glue,” Dufresne declared, “makes us better chefs.”
How to Fake a Steak (or Eggs)
Since 2016, a certain restaurant chain has been using the catchy slogan “You can’t fake steak” in its TV commercials. While we can’t say whether or not that particular chain’s steaks are the real McCoy, the fact is that the slogan is wrong: You can indeed fake steak—by simply using a little meat glue.
At one time, transglutaminase was manufactured entirely from the clotting agent extracted from pig or cow’s blood. Now, it’s typically made by cultivating bacteria to do the job. Most of the meat glue supplied to the food industry comes from none other than Ajinomoto—the company that brought MSG to America.
What meat glue does is to allow restaurants and manufacturers to get away with one of the most devious forms of food fakery. Even the meat industry, when it defends transglutaminase, has to acknowledge that it can be used to fool diners. Meat glue is used much more often to “fake a steak” than to make gourmet shrimp noodles, as chef Dufresne did. By sprinkling the enzyme on various scrap pieces of meat, chicken, or seafood, and then binding it tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerating it for several hours, you can turn out a picture-perfect filet mignon, solid piece of chicken, or a top-dollar-looking filet of fish.
Even experts can’t tell the difference.
If you’ve ever attended a banquet or a convention, or maybe even dined in a restaurant, and were served an expensive-looking steak or sushi at a bargain price, you may have wondered how that came to be. The answer is either that the restaurant owner is losing money with each meal or, more likely, that there’s a bag of meat glue in the kitchen.
The fake food industry has also found use for meat glue in a product bizarrely called “JUST Egg,” something that contains no trace of eggs. But along with brain-damaging amino acids, you will find transglutaminase listed on the JUST Egg label—yet another excellent reason to read food ingredients carefully no matter what brand names the products are given.
...In 2015, researchers from Israel and Germany published a study on how “industrial food additives” could be the cause of the “rising incidence of autoimmune disease.”
...Celiac disease sufferers in particular, who are no doubt taking pains to avoid foods containing gluten, should also be aware of what these researchers believe is a b, which may possibly explain the surge in celiac disease. “Several observations have led to the hypothesis that microbial transglutaminase is a new environmental enhancer of celiac disease,” they noted in a 2015 report, explaining how the substance may affect the immune system and promote intestinal leakage, allowing “more immunogenic foreign molecules to induce celiac disease.”
“If future research substantiates this hypothesis,” they wrote, “the findings will affect food product labeling, food additive policies of the food industry, and consumer health education.”
In the meantime, however, consumers will remain on their own when it comes to protecting their health from this hazardous adhesive addition to their favorite dish...
...
WIND: vote with your wallet, and skip Soylent Green and its ilk.
The bulk of the modern food supply is slow-acting poison—eat whole unprocessed foods whenever possible. This necessarily means no restaurant eating.
Naturally, the FDA is in on the game, calling this disgusting stuff GRAS (generally recognized as safe).
