Comments on: Meat Glue

By: penguinchris

penguinchris — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:26:00 +0000

By: Snig

Snig — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:04:00 +0000

”Mulder, are you saying some creature sucked the meat glue out of the victims? Are we really looking for a meat glue vampire?”

By: Snig

Snig — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:02:00 +0000

I like pie.

By: igpajo

igpajo — Thu, 03 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

That’s exactly what I think about when I hear stories about meat glue; why haven’t we heard of terrorists or other nefarious individuals deploying clouds of meat glue dust among crowded commuter buses or trains. The imagined horrors is exactly what I’d expect out of an episode of Fringe.

By: townandgownie

townandgownie — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:41:00 +0000

Exactly. In addition, a bag of transG is EXPENSIVE. I have one sitting in my freezer and it cost about $100. In addition, it’s shelf life is very limited once opened. Lastly, it’s made by only ONE company and they don’t produce it in any other quantity other than “big bag”.

Nobody would use this product when they could just as easily pawn off Select quality steaks as Choice at half the price.

It’s an interesting compound and it used in the deli meat business and other specialty food businesses but no Ground Round or Sizzler is going to bother.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 02 May 2012 21:47:00 +0000

I love tripe, but don’t cook it dry, like barbequing it. It turns into leather.

By: inkfumes

inkfumes — Wed, 02 May 2012 21:36:00 +0000

I’ll stop commenting now. Arguing the excruciating minutiae and pedantic’s of the exact meanings of comments is insufferable.

By: Jerril

Jerril — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Restaurents that would be interested in this don’t list all the ingredients on the menu anyways, just feature flavors. Usually you’d have to go to a website or ask for the allergy/nutrition card for details. And they’d list it as transglutamase (sp) so who’d know?

By: Jerril

Jerril — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:24:00 +0000

It’s not so much “glue makes contact with outer area of the meat” as much as “when you glue two pieces of meat together, two “outer” surfaces become “inner” surfaces. Unavoidable, and a problem with various other kinds of meat dishes.

The failing is not meat glue somehow magically breeding germs, but with cook-staff not being told it’s a hamburger-like or loaf-like product, or not caring that it is.

I don’t particularly like “solid” cuts of meat myself, gristle and connective tissue are not awesome between my teeth and I can’t afford better cuts of meat, so hamburger all the way here. Cooked medium.

By: Chris May

Chris May — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Yikes. Not surprised to see this kind of sensationalist fluff on gizmodo today, but very surprised to see it here. Also, kinda surprised to see the claim that “Filet mignon served in restaurants is often, in fact, an agglomeration of scraps of lesser beef” as the summary of this story. Any restaraunt caught doing this would quickly be out of business; same with suppliers/purveyors.
In fact, as someone said above, meat glue is more the domain of avant garde chefs in high end restaurants to combine disparate meats for new contexts. I haven’t heard of ANY cases of actual restaurants attempting to deceive customers in the manner you described, let alone your fallacious claims of ” [TG] filet mignon served in restaurants often”. Perhaps some more due diligence is needed when simply linking to a TV news report. http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/05/20/the-trials-of-transglutaminase%E2%80%94the-misunderstood-magic-of-meat-glue/

Of course, the source link is broken, but if you have any documentation/linkage of a single (non-TV news) attempt at a restaurant trying to pass off lesser cuts as filet mignon, I’d love to see it. Otherwise, this story is, as the Dave Arnold summarizes in my link, “horse hockey”.

By: GawainLavers

GawainLavers — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:58:00 +0000

I also like filet, but I won’t pay more for it than rib-eye, as one is often expected.

By: blueelm

blueelm — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Tripe. I was into tripe before it was tripe.

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:40:00 +0000

Yet another unfounded food scare. I’ll be interested once they have evidence, but for the moment, it got too farcical for me to care when I read this about the pink goo “cleaned with ammonia” scare: “Besides being used as a household cleaner and in fertilizers, the
compound releases flammable vapors, and with the addition of certain acids, it can be turned into ammonium nitrate, a common component in homemade bombs.”

At that point, I just cracked up laughing and stopped caring.

Also: meat glue. Was this used in the “Human centipede” movies? If it hasn’t been used yet, I reckon you can bet it will be in the next one, if this current scare gets any bigger.

By: msbpodcast

msbpodcast — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:33:00 +0000

Okay, its meat, from Noo Joyzee, Newark to be specific.

I bet they’re disposing of the bodies there and serving ‘em up as Feijoada, which is a Portugese meat and bean stew.

If it was from Trenton, they’d serve it up as pork “a la Christie.”

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:22:00 +0000

Liked, for much clearer and more correct explanation of the issue :)

By: msbpodcast

msbpodcast — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:21:00 +0000

I started to laugh when I read the sommelier recommends Kaopectate instead of a merlot or cabernet.

If you look around the counter of any such fine dining establishment you’ll also notice that they sell Alka-Seltzer©™® in enveloppes stapled to a piece of cardboard behind the troglodyte at the cash register and have a bowl of those “fecal mints” on the counter to give their departing customers fresh breath, the runs and stomach cramps.

By: robdobbs

robdobbs — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:13:00 +0000

sematics

By: msbpodcast

msbpodcast — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:07:00 +0000

Restaurants like T.G.I.Fridays©™®, Denny’s©™®, Friendly’s©™®, Bennington’s©™®, or similar high-volume, cheap-eats joint probably have just such warnings stating meals may contain reformed meat written in 4 point type and written in black ink on a dark brown background, somewhere at the end of the menu, on the coffee and children’s menu pages where its not likely to be read and in such poor light that it blends into invisibility.

By: roppkind

roppkind — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:13:00 +0000

Very much like this.
http://www.engrish.com/2012/01/fix-me-something-to-eat/
But not.

By: Aloisius

Aloisius — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:09:00 +0000

..if you order filet, you’re an amateur meat eater and deserve to be tricked. Eat bone-in-ribeye.

Agreed. Though I do like a simple strip steak or smaller cuts like flat iron or skirt for flavor.

By: kris spikes

kris spikes — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:35:00 +0000

If you cut into a “steak” and the muscle fiber is going in many different directions you should know something is wrong to begin with. This is exactly what gluing separate meat chunks would produce.

By: morehumanthanhuman

morehumanthanhuman — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:28:00 +0000

Transglutaminase was also used in Fab at Home’s meat printing process that was featured here on boingboing:
http://boingboing.net/2011/03/02/3d-printed-food-scul.html

By: Dan Century

Dan Century — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:23:00 +0000

Meat Glue sounds like a euphemism for ejaculate. Anyway you look at this story it will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

By: Dolphin

Dolphin — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:08:00 +0000

I definitely wouldn’t eat at a place where I felt the need to ask that question.

By: Miriam Pollock

Miriam Pollock — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:06:00 +0000

I see applications for the manufacture of Soylent Green.

By: tedrock

tedrock — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:57:00 +0000

So would we consider using meat glue in creative ways ‘Culinary Remixing?’ I wonder if you could use meat glue to embed bacon inside of a steak or create the ultimate TurDuckEn….. I smell a new trending topic for BoingBoing!

By: Jim Davison

Jim Davison — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:21:00 +0000

The meat glue is not the problem, it’s the (in this case) deceptive purpose for which it is used. I have myself used meat glue rather successfully to make what what an extremely delicious bacon-infused roast.

By: Jorpho

Jorpho — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:59:00 +0000

I knew I felt a certain deja vu.
http://boingboing.net/2011/03/30/meat-glue-sounds-kin.html

By: millie fink

millie fink — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:02:00 +0000

I don’t see a problem with the product itself and its use, only that using it to deceive is pretty dickish.

Pretty much agreed, though I don’t see how a restaurant could profit by serving it without being deceitful. If any place clearly labeled “meat glue” as in the ingredients list for menu items, those items wouldn’t sell.

Conclusion: use of this stuff in restaurants constitutes de facto deception.

By: millie fink

millie fink — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:53:00 +0000

Live at O’Malley’s, this Friday night, it’s the Hipster Butchers.