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If you think the news about supermarket meat contaminated with drug-resistant staphylococcus was bad, hold yourself together, because there’s an even more shocking news coming your way. Two words: glued meat.
Glued meat is being supplied to some of Australia’s most popular eateries. It is also popular with catering companies – if you’ve been to a wedding lately chances are you’ve eaten glued meat.
An event specialist says top hotels and restaurants have been tricking customers for years.
The next time you break a bone, your doctor may just reach for the sandcastle worm. Actually, not the actual worm itself but a bone glue made by the animal:
The worm creates a complex water-based mortar to create a home from grains of sand and bits of shell. The adhesive can stick to wet surfaces and doesn’t dissolve at certain pH levels, making it ideal for medical applications. Once it has done its job, it can become water-soluble and dissolve.
The traditional method of healing broken bones by using metal nails, pins and screws is difficult with smaller bones, says Russel Stewart, one of the creators of the synthetic sandcastle worm glue, and scientists have been looking for a suitable adhesive substitute for decades.
A glue formula used by people in South Africa 70,000 years ago required more intelligence than archaeologists normally attribute to Stone Age men. It was made by mixing red ochre with the gum of acacia trees. It turns out that the red ochre serves more than a decorative purpose, as researchers found out when they made some of the glue themselves.
“We discovered that when we used ochre, the glue is much more robust, and the stone tool doesn’t come off the shaft,” said study team member Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
But making the glue wasn’t easy for the ancient Africans.
It was mentally taxing work that would have required humans to account for differences in the chemistry of gum harvested from different trees and in the iron content of ochre from different sites.
“They couldn’t possibly have known about chemical pH or iron content … but they knew that certain combinations of things worked very well,” Wadley said.
