Meet Meat Glue. You’re Eating It.

A creative way to sell poor cuts of meat at prime prices. Click to watch the video!

It’s called meat glue and “unless you’re a vegetarian, you’re eating it on a regular basis.” The thing is, you might not know it. (Expert butchers can’t tell, either.) Restaurants and meat packers don’t have to tell you so, of course, they don’t.

The Basics: Take the parts of meat that are less appealing and dump them into a vat. Strap on a face mask and gloves and prepare your meat glue, often in powder form. Add meat glue powder to meat mixture and stir. Spoon the meat substance into Saran wrap or a similar packaging. If you’ve used particularly unappealing cuts of meat (or meat that is really old) you can infuse the meat substance with water and flavoring to make it more appealing. Wrap the meat substance tightly and stick it in the fridge for 6-8 hours. Afterwards, you will remove what looks to be one unified lump of meat. It can be sold and marketed like a prime cut of chicken, pork, steak, veal or fish.

Benefits: Meat-glued products aren’t totally evil. On one hand, I appreciate that the animal isn’t being wasted; if there are edible parts available, they are being used.

Deception: Using meat glue is yet another way to deceive customers about the quality of the meat that we are buying. We pay for what we think is a prime cut when we might receive a hodgepodge of lesser cuts that are simply formed to look like the real thing.

For people with dietary restrictions meat glue is particularly disturbing. The glue is made using blood plasma from pigs, cows, and chickens. A meat-glued chicken cutlet may contain glue derived from pigs and cows. A fish fillet may contain blood plasma from veal and chicken. For many, this has adverse religious and ethical implications.

Heath Risks: Meat glue has been banned in the European Union since last year. It’s easy to contract food poisoning from meat-glued cuts since different parts of the animal cook at different speeds. Ordering rare or medium “steak”  may result in a meat-glued steak that is medium on one part and nearly raw on others.

What are you thoughts on meat glue? Are there added benefits that I’ve overlooked?

Source: Today Tonight