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General News    H2'ed 5/9/14

Five Gross Ways Your Meat is Kept Safe to Eat

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Another unrecognizable chemical is sodium tripolyphosphate used as an "anti-coagulant for use in recovered livestock blood which is subsequently used in food products," says FSIS. According to Food and Water Watch seafood like scallops, shrimp, hake, sole or imitation crab meat may be may soaked in sodium tripolyphosphate to make it appear firmer, smoother and glossier. Sodium tripolyphosphate, "a suspected neurotoxin, as well as a registered pesticide and known air contaminant in the state of California," says Food and Water Watch also can make seafood weight more. To avoid sodium tripolyphosphate buy fish labeled as "dry," says Food and Water Watch and avoid seafood marked as "wet." We have not found advice how to avoid the chemical in meat.

Bacteriophages

An underreported way in which Big Food is seeking to kill meat pathogens, especially antibiotic-resistant pathogens, is with bacteriophages. Phages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria, essentially turning the bacteria cell into a phage production factory until the bacteria cell bursts, releasing hundreds of copies of new phages, which go on to infect and kill more bacteria. Phages, discovered in 1919, were used to treat bacterial infections but fell out of favor when antibiotics became widely used in the 1940's. Antibiotics had the advantage of attacking more than one bacterium at the same time and not usually being recognized by a patient's immune system, so they could be used over and over in the same person to fight bacterial infection without producing any immune response.

In 2008, OmniLytics, Inc. announced FSIS approval (issuance of a no objection letter) for a bacteriophage treatment for poultry it developed in conjunction with Elanco, the animal division of Eli Lilly to reduce salmonella. Other, similar products soon surfaced for meat production. At least nine bacteriophage uses are listed in the FSIS 2014 directive, mostly sprayed on the hides or feathers of live animals to reduce bacterial count before slaughter. While phages are certainly "greener" than antibiotics, there are two reasons many food activists do not laud the development. Bacteriophages accommodate rather than reform the high-volume, low-ethics factory farming and do not cleaning up drug excesses. (It is like the researchers developing a prion-free cow rather than reducing mad cow risks. What?) The other reason is phages could become yet another tool of factory farming. Cattle and other livestock operators could use phages to make animals gain weight without risking antibiotic resistance observed a recent documentary.

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Martha Rosenberg is an award-winning investigative public health reporter who covers the food, drug and gun industries. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, is distributed by Random (more...)
 

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