Meaty revelation

Since 2004 the federal government has allowed meat producers to treat their product with carbon monoxide. They use it because it makes the meat look fresher. Now comes news that the U.S. Department of Agriculture signed off on the technique "even though scientists at the two companies promoting the technology had questioned the validity of their own safety tests."

Here's what Congressional investigators just learned: an employee of Hormell wrote May 5, 2004 to an employer at Cargill about their companies' joint effort to persuade the feds their process was safe. He said they were finding that the more rotten the meat, the less microbial contamination they were measuring: "we are puzzled by the data.... Quite honestly, this test seemed to raise more questions than what it answered."

The Ag Department was not puzzled. Or maybe they didn't really care. They signed off on the technique post haste. The FDA still calls the technique "generally recognized as safe." Though since the technique is banned is the European Union, Japan, and Canada, that recognition would not appear to be as general as the FDA would wish. Also, now that several supermarket chains have recently announced they'd stop selling "gassed meats."

I guess you might say the market took care of the problem. Three years after the problem arose. Hope you didn't eat any bad meat in the interim. And who knows what kind of toxic techniques we'll learn the government signed off on only three years after the harm was first known?

Thank Michigan's Democratic congressman Bart Stupak, by the way, for being on the case. Don't thank his fellow subcommittee members Marsha Blackburn and Edward Whitfield, both Republicans. They claim the issue is just "an 'intra-industry' fight under the guise of consumer protection."

They get today's E. coli conservatism merit badges.

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