Introduction

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The barbecue is Sunday, and as you stroll down the grocery store aisles, there’s only one thing on your mind: meat. Not just any meat, though. Tender, juicy ground beef, just waiting for a grill and a bun. Sitting there in its case, it looks perfect; the kind of fresh, healthy red that promises a mouthwatering hamburger and a full belly.

Two days later, when you and three of your best friends are suffering from painful abdominal cramps and diarrhea –– the symptoms of Clostridium perfringens poisoning –– you wonder to yourself “How did this happen? The meat looked so good!”

But in today’s world, seeing is not believing –– at least not when it comes to meat. Because of an ill-thought decision by our Food and Drug Administration, the meat industry was allowed to inject the toxic gas carbon monoxide into your ground beef’s packaging. The gas kept the meat red and fresh looking long after it had already spoiled, and when you ate it (past its sell–by date; you looked at that, didn’t you?) you also consumed the bacterial condoplex that had sprung up in the interim.

There was no way for you to know that your meat had been cased in an atmosphere different from normal air, because companies are not required to let consumers know about things like that. Then again, there should be no problem with that, right? Amazingly enough, FDA thinks not.

Carbon monoxide (often referred to as CO) is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, one measly oxygen molecule away from the carbon dioxide we all exhale. But that one molecule makes a big difference in that it does very, very bad things to the human body at very, very low concentrations.

A natural byproduct of the Earth’s volcanic eruptions, humans also add to CO’s presence in the atmosphere through driving, manufacturing, and the incomplete combustion that takes place in furnaces. The gas is all around us, albeit typically at levels that cause little trouble (usually around 0.1 parts per million in the open air). However, when that count goes up, the problems start –– hence the need for CO detectors in our homes.

CO is toxic because it sticks to hemoglobin, a molecule in blood that usually carries oxygen, even better than oxygen can. When people are exposed to higher levels of CO, the gas takes the place of oxygen in the bloodstream and wreaks havoc. Milder exposures mean headaches, confusion, and tiredness. Higher exposures mean unconsciousness and death, and even those who survive CO poisoning can suffer serious long-term neurological consequences.¹

So why would anyone ever want to package food with this stuff? The answer is simple, clever, and potentially dangerous: it keeps meat redder, longer. Today, food usually does quite a bit of traveling before it hits the table, and producers, processors, and grocers have to maintain a delicate balancing act to ensure it stays –– and looks –– fresh. The meat industry alone is estimated to lose around $1 billion every year to meat that has started to look unappetizing.²

So industry scientists, pressed to find new and more effective ways of maintaining food’s appearance for longer and longer stretches, decided to exploit CO’s very toxicity to squeeze in a few more days of red.

As noted, CO binds more effectively to hemoglobin than oxygen does, but it also out competes oxygen for the attentions of another molecule, myoglobin. Myoglobin is a protein found in muscle tissue, such as meat, and is responsible for the same role hemoglobin fills in the bloodstream. In the presence of oxygen, myoglobin grabs it and becomes oxymyoglobin, reddening in the process. CO, however, sticks to myoglobin far more readily than oxygen, forming (naturally enough) carboxymyoglobin, and an even more vivid and long–lasting pigment.

When consumers see the fresh, unspoiled color of packaged, case ready meat –– meaning that it arrives at the grocery store ready to go on display, rather than needing a butcher’s preparation –– it is only natural for them to assume its hue is natural. But there is nothing natural about it; it is an artificial interloper, the product of carboxymyoglobin, specifically introduced by meat companies to appeal to the eye.

To be clear, CO has no physical effect on meat’s safety. Eating CO-treated meat alone will not make you sick. However, its supercharged color lasts up to a year, far beyond the date when steaks, ground beef, and fish are no longer safe for human consumption. The process of treating meat by sucking oxygen out of a package and pumping CO in, used by industry as part of a so-called “Modified Atmosphere Packaging” system, saves meat processors billions of dollars every year. The only costs to shoppers are their right to know and their health.

To defend the practice, which has been banned in countries across the world, FDA has tossed up an argument illogical at best and disingenuous at worst. Consumers, they claim, simply do not care about meat’s color and pay it no mind when making purchasing decisions.

Cargill, one of the nation’s largest food companies, has offered a similarly perplexing rationale behind keeping CO’s presence a secret. Telling consumers, CEO Gregory Page suggested, would be confusing and pointless. “I don’t think people want to be distracted by information that’s not helpful to their purchasing decision,” he said.3

Luckily, these arguments have not passed muster with citizens, consumer groups, and a few interested lawmakers. “To put it bluntly,” Rep. Bart Stupak said in a 2007 hearing on the technology, “the sole purpose of carbon monoxide packaging is to fool consumers into believing that the meat and fish they buy is fresh, no matter how old it is and no matter how decayed it might be.” ⁴

The public deserves to know what it is eating, how it has been prepared, and how it has been packaged. If FDA is serious about its goal of protecting the public health, it must allow consumers to make educated decisions based on sound regulations and end the practice of secretly packaging meat in an environment that turns its appearance into a lie. In order to fulfill its mission, FDA must rescind its approval of this controversial, deceptive, and unsafe practice.

FDA must rescind its position that carbon monoxide should be classified as something generally recognized as safe. If al-lowed in meat and fish packaging, CO must be reconsidered as a color additive and be subjected to the formal FDA approval process for color additives, including a federally mandated notice and comment period. Companies that wish to use CO in their packaged meat products should be legally required to label for the presence of the gas so that consumers can make educated decisions about their purchases and health.

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