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Food Security

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J.J. Rodríguez Jerez

Grisc – Grup de Recerca en Gobernança del Risc (UAB)

"Meat glue" vetoed by EU

21 may 2010


Photo: cx33000
In April, the European Commission presented to the European Parliament a proposal to approve the commercialization of an enzyme capable of “gluing” piece of meats back together. That request was denied a few days ago.

The use of leftover meat for human consumption has been a standard practice for many years. Any technological process that leads to the cuts of meat or fillets implies obtaining remains unsuitable for cooking (if the piece are too small) or for frying, since they neither have the appropriate shape or size. Therefore, the only solution is to use these remains to make ground beef.

The initial quality of these remains is identical to quality of the parts they come from, so they are normally used and marketed for a variety of foods. It is unclear what the volume of leftover meat produced per year is, but a figure around 10% would be a good estimate. If from this data we believe that meat production in Spain reaches more than 5 million tons per year, it is easy to get an idea of the amount of meat that is minced or, ultimately, discarded in landfills, with the subsequent environmental risks.

Undoubtedly, this huge amount of usable food may be reintroduced back into the food chain through the use of enzymes that perform the same action as they carry out in animals and humans, forming a natural glue to paste bits and pieces of damaged tissues back together again.

Several active proteins

The first enzyme described for this purpose was transglutaminase, known as “meat glue” due to its properties that allow it to unite proteins by fusing the residues of the amino acid lysine with glutamine, which results in a very resistant bond. This implies a solid physical connection, and since it comes from the very same animals from which the meat is taken, it is not an additive but an ingredient.

However, this protein, even when it generated high expectations, has never been used on a large scale by industry because its production was very low and came at a high price. But not long ago, researchers managed to increase its use by cloning microorganisms, including Streptoverticillium mobaraense and Corynebacterium glutamicum, capable of synthesizing the enzyme in sufficient quantities.

The tons of meat that are discarded each year pose a major problem for the environment  In this vein, research has progressed in other ways to achieve the same effect. In 2005, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) evaluated the use of another mixture consisting in the use of the enzyme thrombin along with fibrinogen. The committee's findings were clear, since they found no risk to consumer health.

In fact, thrombin facilitates the formation of fibrin strands in the presence of fibrinogen. This is a natural mechanism that is activated by the need to heal the wounds that occur in any animal organism. It acts as a glue, and we activate it whenever we damage a tissue, whether from a small cut to a larger injury to a vital organ.

Applied to meat, it is mixed with several piece that then form unions in the same way as the organism would repair a cut of injury. This mixture of active proteins does not change the meat’s color, flavor or texture and does not constitute in itself any increase risk to human health.

The EU and meat glue

For the reasons explained above, and on the request of several companies interested in using leftover meat parts, the European Commission presented this past April a proposal to the European Parliament asking for the approval of the marketing and use of this technology.

Following this request, many companies and institutions, and most of the world press believed that the European Union (EU) had approved its use. Nothing was further from the truth. The Commission can not approve laws if they are ratified by Parliament and, in this particular case, in a decision based on ignorance and prejudice, the institution rejected the proposal in mid-May.

Unfortunately, either the supporters of the technology were not able to properly explain its benefits or our parliamentarians did not give an objective response and thought more with their stomachs than with their heads. It is clear that the economic, productive and environmental situation Europe finds itself in begs for creative solutions for today’s problems and in anticipation of those coming in the future.

It does not seem like the best idea to toss thousands of tons of meat in the trash simply because we can not make a steak or a good-looking cut of meat out of them. This is a huge attack on the environment, since each gram of meat in the landfill is capable of producing billions of bacteria that produce CO2 and pollute the water and pollute. In contrast, it appears that the majority of parliamentarians opposed this advance in food technology for the simple reason that they do not want to eat meat “glued together” while refusing to evaluate its other positive implications.

For once it might be interesting to recognize that the consumer should decide, depending on the price of the final product and its features, and always under the criteria of food security. In this sense, the use of technology should appear on the label, since consumers should not be tricked into thinking they are buying steaks when they are buying “glued meat.”

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