An employee of Magnit demonstrated how chickens are pumped with chemicals. What is sold meat pumped with? What is pumped meat

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No matter what anyone says, but meat is the most popular food product in our country and it is not without reason that those who know how to "work" with meat are especially valued among cooks. If earlier meat was considered more of a delicacy than everyday food, today meat dishes are present on the tables every day. Meat dishes are the basis of a good lunch and dinner in many nations of the world. Suffice it to recall fragrant kebabs, chops baked with mushrooms and cheese, English roast beef, American steaks, etc. Meat cooking has many recipes, but one thing unites them - a quality product. Agree, to buy a good piece of meat in our time is not an easy task. According to statistics, the average Russian eats about 70 kg of meat per year, but in reality this figure is half that. Today meat is scolded by all and sundry, and rightly so. The fact is that instead of 1 kg of purchased meat, a pound of meat and half a liter of chemicals and hormones get on our table. According to scientists, it is the hormones in meat that are the causes of excess weight in children and adolescents. How to choose the right meat and what you especially need to pay attention to when buying, how to distinguish "inflated" meat from normal - the topic of our today's conversation.

Meat - the muscles of an animal with adipose and connective tissues, as well as adjacent bone tissue (meat on the bones) or without it (boneless meat). Mostly animal meat is used for food, less often wild animal meat. Depending on the species characteristics, the chemical composition and properties of meat vary. Pork has a more tender texture, a high content of adipose tissue, a pleasant specific aroma and taste. Beef is represented by coarser muscle fibers, has a bright color, contains less extractives and refractory fat. Lamb is considered fatty meat, but surpasses pork in organoleptic properties.

The slaughter of cattle in Russia before the adoption of Christianity was in the nature of sacrifice, but with the adoption of Christianity, the population began to observe fasting and meat-eaters. Before the era of Peter I, cattle were killed wherever possible - in the markets, in the hallways of houses, in wastelands, on the banks of rivers or in an open place near ravines. Peter I, looking at this, ordered the construction of slaughterhouses and issued decrees regulating the meat trade. In case of non-compliance with the norms, merchants were very severely punished. Later, in 1857, the "Medical Charter" was issued in Russia, in which the rules governing the slaughter of livestock were formulated in a legislative manner.

Over the years, sanitary requirements (certain epidemiological standards on the content of substances harmful to human health in meat, as well as on the permissible shelf life of meat) have become perfect. Today, Rospotrebnadzor authorities put forward stringent requirements, starting from the moment the animal was born and ending with the delivery of finished meat products to stores and markets, because meat processed or stored in violation of technology may have pathogenic microorganisms for humans.

Unfortunately, not all suppliers, as well as sellers of meat products, conscientiously comply with all these standards. Something is wrong with the meat market today. If earlier any seller could easily tell you which animal this meat is from - from a male or a female, today he will simply lower his eyes or lie. The fact is that today the largest gain is given by animals of the middle kind. That is, for quick weight gain, males are given female hormones with food, and females, on the contrary, male hormones. Here is an example for you: in order for a piglet to grow naturally into an adult animal ready for slaughter, it is necessary to wait a year or even a little more. But, having pumped it with hormones, after seven months it becomes suitable for sale. On the face - saved time and money (no one talks about our health with you!) For the manufacturer. This is the time and not the last.

The second problem is related to the transportation and storage of meat. Many people think that the most delicious meat is after slaughter, this is not so. Before you can start butchering an animal, two days must pass, and this is again time and money. Therefore, new magic wands - "ripeners" come into play. Thanks to them, the muscles relax faster, and the meat becomes twice as heavy. Double result, double profit.

Unfortunately, now, it is almost impossible to buy good meat in the store. It seems that everyone knows that, by law, stores are required to dispose of expired goods. But thanks to the resourcefulness of the sellers, rotten meat is sold under the guise of normal meat, because for this you need to slightly conjure over the product. Rescues such sellers - packaging. So our first piece of advice is to try not to buy prepackaged meat. The product must be seen by the face and, if possible, from all sides. But back to our "craftsmen". Sellers can cover the poor-quality part of a piece of meat with fresher meat. The lighting in the window does not allow you to see this, so ask the seller to show the selected piece from different angles. Also remember that if the meat has been frozen and thawed several times, the ice will be brown. Now, as for touch-up: television has enlightened us more than once on this topic: meat is often reanimated in potassium permanganate baths. This procedure will get rid of the smell, and give color, and remove cadaveric spots.

So, where to buy fresh meat. Best of all in proven places: be it a store or a market. But here and there you have to be on the lookout. As for the market - you should buy meat only where it is allowed and there is a veterinary service. The advantage of buying meat in the market is that there you can take a good look at it and even smell it. So, what you need to know when choosing meat.

First of all, you should pay attention to the color. In benign beef, the color is red, the shade of ripe raspberries, in veal it is pink, the older the animal, the darker the shade of meat will be. In old beef, the fat has a yellow or yellow-cream hue, in young beef, the fat is almost white. Fresh lamb will be brownish-red, while pork will be white-pink in color and slightly grainy. Winding on the shelves, the meat acquires a pale pink or pale red crust, this phenomenon is acceptable. The meat should be relatively dry, without mucus and foreign visible spots.

It happens that a chopped piece of meat lies on the counter all day, it winds and begins to smell unpleasant. Such meat is called "sneaky". As we already wrote, some sellers, in order not to suffer losses, in order to achieve a good appearance and trying to restore the original appearance of the meat, soak it in a solution of potassium permanganate (folk - "potassium permanganate"). The solution does not leave a smell, does not interrupt the aroma of meat, it is immediately difficult to figure it out. And in this case it is good to know the following. In nature, the fatty layers of meat have a white or creamy hue, after a solution of "potassium permanganate" the layers become pink.

• Smell

The smell is a good indicator of the quality of the meat. The beef smells of fresh herbs and milk. Lamb meat over a year old has a specific, subtle, slightly spicy aroma, lamb meat has almost no smell. Pork smells less specific, but distinct. The quality of meat by smell can be checked as follows. Ask the seller to heat the knife and pierce the meat. If it is fresh, the smell will be pleasant, as if only the meat was thrown into the pan.

The fat present on the meat also serves as a good indicator when choosing. Lamb fat is soft, spreadable, has a creamy tint; beef fat is dense, crumbling yellowish or white (marble fat indicates a grain-fed animal), rather dense; pork fat is white or creamy if the pork is old. When choosing, be sure to check the elasticity of the meat.

Unscrupulous sellers with a thirst for profit use a syringe to pump water with moisture-retaining additives into the meat in order to increase the weight, and with it the cost of a piece of meat. You can easily check the water content. You should press hard with your finger in the middle of the piece, and if a little liquid appears in the hole, then most likely it is “pumped up” with water. In some cases, you can only check at home by frying the meat, literally from the first minutes, when heated, the fibers shrink, displacing water. In this case, just change the seller.

Natalia Petrova , Oksana Yelnova especially for website

The sentimental topic of cheating consumers does not excite anyone except the consumers themselves - this, unfortunately, is an indisputable fact. It is especially familiar to the inhabitants of large cities flooded with supermarkets and spontaneous markets. But, as they say, “Saving the drowning is the work of the drowning themselves,” and if it is not possible to go somewhere to Tmutarakan, start a cow and a vegetable garden, then you need to arm yourself with knowledge of what, where and how they fake it. In this article, we will reveal the whole truth about meat.

During the year, the average Russian consumes up to 70 kilograms of meat. This is almost half as much as the average European eats. However, if we determine exactly what this dubious product is made of, it turns out that we eat half as much meat as we think. In fact, we buy a kilogram of appetizing tenderloin, but in reality we get a pound of meat and half a liter of liquid of unknown origin.

You will be interested to read:

As you know, after slaughter, some time must pass for the meat to become more tender. In a couple of days, blood drains and muscles relax, only in this way veal or pork chops will be soft and tender. But time is money, and meatpacking plants, not wanting to lose it, pump carcasses with a chemical solution that increases weight and speeds up the maturation of meat. And for this solution we pay our hard-earned money. Producers are so fond of the process of “squirting” that a piglet that weighed 100 kg during life, after slaughter, having lost blood, bones and entrails, weighs 110 kg. But what exactly do we put in our mouths along with a fragrant and appetizing piece of steak?

In fact, now you simply will not find pure meat. Everything and everywhere, from shops to markets, injects the product, only the composition and dosage differ. Thickeners (carrageenan and gum) and soy extract are diligently pumped into beef, pork, lamb and poultry. The amount of injected solution directly depends on the structure of the meat. The leader is beef, due to the dense fibrous structure of the pulp, the weight of beef tenderloin can be increased by almost 80%. In second place in terms of the content of water and additives is pork - the original piece becomes heavier by about half (50%). Then follows the bird - our favorite pockmark "swells" by 40%, and most of it goes to the legs.

Manufacturers claim that the solutions they use do not harm health in any way, and serve an exclusively good purpose - to preserve the presentation, to make the meat soft and juicy. In addition, we, the poor buyers, cannot afford real, non-spattered meat at all, since the cost of a natural product will simply go through the roof.

The truth about frozen and thawed meat

Directly depends on the method of freezing. Meat frozen incorrectly loses almost all useful properties. While a fresh product and a product frozen in a quick way are not too different. Nutritionists assure that at low temperatures and a sharp freeze, all vitamins, enzymes and trace elements are not destroyed.

Repeated freezing is also detrimental to meat. Thawed and then re-frozen meat has a low biological value. The crystals formed during repeated freezing destroy amino acids and all useful substances. Such meat is also different in taste, moreover, it can be simply dangerous to health.

It is very important to know how to properly defrost tenderloin. When defrosted in a microwave oven, at room temperature or under running water, the fibers are destroyed and, accordingly, all nutritional value is lost. Avoid large temperature differences. After taking the meat out of the freezer, place it in the refrigerator for several hours until completely thawed, and only then start cooking.

An ordinary buyer cannot determine re-frozen meat by eye. But it is clearly visible when defrosting. If the meat has acquired a dark brown color, and water with blood oozes out of the piece, most likely it has already been repeatedly placed in the freezer.

NTV is a well-known horror story of the people. But… is this channel lying? Or simply chooses the most terrible for us among the whole mass of information? It seems that so...

Somehow a program was shown that all the meat sold was pumped up with special translucent, whitish liquids that retain moisture ...

Correspondents of the site +#@"; asked the deputy general director of the very enterprise that produces these liquids, what kind of rubbish he injects into our products ...

To be honest, I don’t fucking believe in the sincerity of this Alexei Izmailov. To a direct question whether he himself eats such meat, he replied that, of course, he does. And then - they say, you need to understand what is real. now you can only get non-stuffed meat from a grandmother in the village ...

If he understands that the liquid pumped by him is intended mainly to improve the presentation and increase the shelf life of the product, and not to make this product really better, he is not an idiot to eat it after injection ... And, of course, not an idiot to admit that “undiluted” meat comes to him :)

Do you yourself eat meat pumped with such a solution?

Certainly. You will understand that now you can only get unseasoned meat from your grandmother in the village. Everything else, including the markets, is already pumped up. Both domestic production and imported.

What is included in this solution?

What you call a "solution" is properly called a brine. They are injected with meat not only so that it increases in volume. More precisely, not so much for this. This mixture has two sides - technological and economic.

From the technological side, brine is a complex set of additives, each of which has its own purpose. For example, the composition of a typical brine used to inject meat: stabilizers (E 450, E 451), gelling agent (E 407), dextrose, flavor and aroma enhancer (E 621), antioxidant (E 301), thickener (E 415), extracts spices.

Stabilizers are phosphates that stabilize the PH (acidity level). In meat, this parameter varies greatly from batch to batch, since it strongly depends on what the cows and pigs ate in the last weeks of their lives. If the acidity is not stabilized, the meat will be extremely dry and will not retain moisture.

The gelling agent is the same carrageenan, an extract from seaweed. Everyone has probably come across the fact that algae, which seem large and dense in water, dry up and become almost weightless when it hits land. This property is used here - one part of carrageenan powder can take 25-40 parts of water, forming a gel. This additive is introduced into the composition of the brine in order for the product to have an elastic, “rubber” consistency.

Dextrose is the same as glucose, sugar. Introduced in small quantities for taste.
Flavor and aroma enhancer - monosodium glutamate. Well, for what it is needed is quite understandable.
Antioxidant - is introduced so that the meat does not lose color and is stored longer.
The thickener, usually guar gum (a powder from the fruit of the guar tree growing in India), has similar properties to carrageenans and is used in diapers and pads. It is added to improve consistency and additional moisture binding.

Spice extracts - natural concentrated extracts, added to give a flavor note. As an antioxidant, ordinary ascorbic acid or its derivatives, sodium ascorbate, are used.

This is what concerns the technological side of the issue. I repeat: with the help of these additives, we form the consistency of the meat product, juiciness, color and taste.

Well, the economic side is that some of these additives allow you to keep the water pumped into the meat. The cost price and, as a result, the price of the product naturally depend on the amount of this water. Technologists at enterprises do not inject products out of natural anger, but for one simple reason - if this is not done, then firstly, the meat will be dry and fresh, and in a couple of days it will acquire a characteristic weathered color. Well, and secondly, because it will be very expensive and not every consumer will be able to call him. So this is a forced measure, for which we ourselves vote with our wallets.

And how much water is added to the meat?

If we take the amount of moisture introduced, we can make the following gradation (not by meat, but by the finished product - a delicacy product such as ham or carbonade):
Expensive "delicacy" (beef, pork) - moisture is injected up to 30% of the mass of meat.
Middle segment - 35-50% by weight of meat
Budget segment - 60-80% moisture is introduced.
Due to the structure of poultry meat, it is impossible to inject more than 25-30% moisture into chicken delicacies.
Chopped hams in a polyamide casing can be filled with more than 80% water.
That's the kind of economy.

That is, when buying products of the budget segment, as you called it, people get more water and less nutrients with them, less amino acids, vitamins, what a person actually eats meat for?

I want to tell you, as a marketer with many years of experience, this is what: only bodybuilders and other extreme radicals eat amino acids and vitamins in meat. A normal person eats meat in order to taste the meat, get the feeling of chewing the meat, feel full, and be aware of the fact that he has eaten the meat. And how much something is there - water or proteins, he does not really care. If you recalculate in grams of protein per ruble, then it turns out about the same what to eat - better and more expensive or cheaper but with water. People are quite aware of this, but they themselves play this game, precisely because they expect what I said from food, and not amino acids with proteins.

Site site continues a series of publications
in the footsteps of the sensational project of the NTV channel
"Meat. The history of the all-Russian deception. The topic of the next investigation of our editorial staff was the injection procedure - the introduction through the needles of a special solution that increases the volume of meat.

The translucent whitish liquid for pumping meat shown on NTV made a strong impression on us, and for clarification we turned to Alexei Izmailov, deputy general director of one of the largest domestic companies producing those same mixtures for stuffing.

Alexey reassured us by saying that “meat processing is one of the most tightly controlled branches of the food industry, and if something in the components of the solution was dangerous, it would have been banned long ago.”

- Do you yourself eat meat pumped with such a solution?

Certainly. You will understand that now you can only get unseasoned meat from your grandmother in the village. Everything else, including the markets, is already pumped up. Both domestic production and imported.

What is included in this solution?

What you call a "solution" is properly called a brine. They are injected with meat not only so that it increases in volume. More precisely, not so much for this. This mixture has two sides - technological and economic.

From the technological side, brine is a complex set of additives, each of which has its own purpose. For example, the composition of a typical brine used to inject meat: stabilizers (E 450, E 451), gelling agent (E 407), dextrose, flavor and aroma enhancer (E 621), antioxidant (E 301), thickener (E 415), extracts spices.

Stabilizers are phosphates that stabilize the PH (acidity level). In meat, this parameter varies greatly from batch to batch, since it strongly depends on what the cows and pigs ate in the last weeks of their lives. If the acidity is not stabilized, the meat will be extremely dry and will not retain moisture.

The gelling agent is the same carrageenan, an extract from seaweed. Everyone has probably come across the fact that algae, which seem large and dense in water, dry up and become almost weightless when it hits land. This property is used here - one part of carrageenan powder can take 25-40 parts of water, forming a gel. This additive is introduced into the composition of the brine in order for the product to have an elastic, “rubber” consistency.

Dextrose is the same as glucose, sugar. Introduced in small quantities for taste.
Flavor and aroma enhancer - monosodium glutamate. Well, for what it is needed is quite understandable.
Antioxidant - is introduced so that the meat does not lose color and is stored longer.
The thickener, usually guar gum (a powder from the fruit of the guar tree growing in India), has similar properties to carrageenans and is used in diapers and pads. It is added to improve consistency and additional moisture binding.

Spice extracts - natural concentrated extracts, added to give a flavor note. As an antioxidant, ordinary ascorbic acid or its derivatives, sodium ascorbate, are used.

This is what concerns the technological side of the issue. I repeat: with the help of these additives, we form the consistency of the meat product, juiciness, color and taste.

Well, the economic side is that some of these additives allow you to keep the water pumped into the meat. The cost price and, as a result, the price of the product naturally depend on the amount of this water. Technologists at enterprises do not inject products out of natural anger, but for one simple reason - if this is not done, then firstly, the meat will be dry and fresh, and in a couple of days it will acquire a characteristic weathered color. Well, and secondly, because it will be very expensive and not every consumer will be able to call him. So this is a forced measure, for which we ourselves vote with our wallets.

- And how much water is added to the meat?

If we take the amount of moisture introduced, we can make the following gradation (not by meat, but by the finished product - a delicacy product such as ham or carbonade):
Expensive "delicacy" (beef, pork) - moisture is injected up to 30% of the mass of meat.
Middle segment - 35-50% by weight of meat
Budget segment - 60-80% moisture is introduced.
Due to the structure of poultry meat, it is impossible to inject more than 25-30% moisture into chicken delicacies.
Chopped hams in a polyamide casing can be filled with more than 80% water.
That's the kind of economy.

That is, when buying products of the budget segment, as you called it, people get more water and less nutrients with them, less amino acids, vitamins, what a person actually eats meat for?

I want to tell you, as a marketer with many years of experience, this is what: amino acids and vitamins in meat are eaten only by bodybuilders and other extreme radicals. A normal person eats meat in order to taste the meat, get the feeling of chewing the meat, feel full, and be aware of the fact that he has eaten the meat. And how much something is there - water or proteins, he does not really care. If you recalculate in grams of protein per ruble, then it turns out about the same what to eat - better and more expensive or cheaper but with water. People are fully aware of this, but they themselves play this game, precisely because they expect from food what I said, and not amino acids with proteins.