Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 211
‘Meat glue’ just might be our undoing
J
ust when we’ve dodged the
pink-slime attack, they are
at it again, my friends. Now,
we have to be concerned about
“meat glue.”
Meat glue, or transglutaminase, is basically a powder that
can fuse two or more odd-sized
hunks of meat into a single
piece that is larger and more appealing to the eye — and I read
it is used in many establishments that serve meat in bulk,
such as banquet halls or highvolume restaurants.
Now, the very least of the
concerns this brings up is the
possibility you might be cheated, paying a premium price, say,
for a natural steak you assume
is large and top-shelf, when it is
actually a “restructured steak,”
as they call them, made up of
leftover chunks previously rejected by the pink-slime people.
And, of course, I exaggerate
here; that’s my job. But there is
also an increased risk of bacterial contamination when the
outside edges of two slabs of
meat are joined while raw.
Apparently, meat glue allows proteins to fuse together
to form one connected piece of
meat, pretty much seamlessly.
And so, if I have eaten such a
Franken-steak, I am unaware of
it. But I also read that this stuff
is used in imitation crab meat
and fish balls, and we all love
those so much, right?
Yum.
Meat glue can bond any protein to any protein, and one can
only hope it is a one-time thing.
I mean, I don’t want my reconstructed steak welding itself to
the wall of my intestine — at
least no more than regular red
meat does, anyway.
But there are further implications, mes amis, from
things that are just aesthetically wrong, such as a fish fillet
fused to a duck butt, to matters
of galactic import. You see, as
with any source of super power, meat glue, falling into the
wrong hands, could be used for
world domination.
Jim
WALKER
DON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY
Consider: Like an amoeba,
massively enlarging as it absorbs all life around it, so could
meat glue bond all proteins together that come into its proximity. One steak in a restaurant refrigerator becomes two,
becomes 100, then absorbs the
chicken and lamb. Then it mixes in the chef, sous chef and fry
cook, who happen to wander
into the cooler.
This “Thing” (like in the ’82
movie), now sporting teeth and
hair in odd places and walking
on stubby drumsticks, bursts
out of the cooler, magnetically
drawing in the cute little hostess and then the old lady whose
walker can’t move fast enough.
It crashes out the restaurant
door, sucking people out of cars
and growing ever-larger by taking in stray dogs, cats and photo-snapping tourists.
Like a snowball gathering
size, our meat monster could
clear the streets of New York,
rumble across Jersey, sucking
up Snooki and crew, bounce to
the Southwest, absorbing entire
cow herds — and finally threaten L.A. because, well, we’re
trying to halt runaway production, right?
Now this scenario could
play out in several standard
cinematic plots. For example, Will Smith might have
to drop a nuke into one of the
large and obscene orifices that
are rimmed by throbbing lips
or wiggling earlobes. Or the
Avengers might have to take
a time out from their bravura
movie promotional tour.
Of course, M. Night Shyamalan could make it all go away
with a little water, but only he
could, because no one else has
dared use that plot device since
the “Wizard of Oz.”
Whichever way the battle goes,
in the end, the mad scientist that
controls Megameat would have
to be thwarted in his attempts to
“dare I say it — rule the world!”
That’s all fine and good, but
what do you do with a disintegrating mass of meat the size
of Mt. Everest? While the Will
Smith option might blow it all
into toasted burgers, you’ve got
to collect them fast, and then
the problem becomes getting
enough buns and condiments.
But maybe Thor could hammer the thing like a croquet
ball, sending it all the way to
Antarctica, where it will freeze
into submission until global warming releases it. And by
then there won’t be any meat
left on the planet for it to absorb, so who cares?
I’m just sayin’, say “no” to
meat glue.
Comment at jwalker@thesignal.com or at http://Twitter.
com/DontSeriously.
