Читать книгу Foods and Their Adulteration - Harvey Washington Wiley - Страница 51

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Meats which cannot be eaten at the time of or soon after slaughter are necessarily preserved until the time of consumption. It is difficult to draw a definite line between a preserved and a fresh meat. A general distinction is the following: Fresh meat is meat which is prepared for consumption without the use of any condiment or preservative, without sterilization, and with none of the artificial methods of keeping, except cleanliness and a low temperature.

The above definition, as will be seen, covers meat placed in cold storage. A special distinction, however, must be made in this case between meat placed in cold storage for the purpose of transportation only and meat placed in cold storage to be kept for an indefinite time. Where meats are prepared for consumption by slaughter and appropriate dressing and shipped long distances to the consumer the cold storage car, ship, and warehouse become a necessity. There is some reasonable limit for keeping such products, beyond which they should be differentiated from fresh meats. Whenever meats are kept in cold storage so long as to afford the opportunity for the growth of a mould, or undergo other changes of a chemical or physical character which distinguish them from the fresh products, they should be placed in a different class. Fresh meats may, therefore, be divided as follows:

Class I. Meats intended for immediate consumption and passed to the consumer within, at the most, one week after slaughter. Class II. Cold storage meats, which are placed in refrigerators, frozen, and kept for a longer period than one week. There is evidently also a limit to the length of time which meat should remain in cold storage, no matter how low the temperature may be, since the action of organisms which produce decay cannot be entirely overcome. The exact limit at which frozen meats can be kept without becoming inedible has not been determined. Without this determination, however, it is advisable that such limit should not be approached. Inasmuch as the supply of fresh meat is practically uniform, or can be made so by the dealer therein, there seems no good reason for the storage of meat in refrigerator compartments for a longer time than is necessary for transportation and a reasonable time thereafter for passing into consumption, except in cases of emergency. It might be safe to say that no meat should be kept in a cold storage warehouse longer than a month after its reception. Numerous instances might be cited in which meat may be kept for a much longer time, but the question for the consumer is not how long a while meats can be kept but how soon they can be placed in his hands. In this connection it should not be forgotten that it is the opinion of perhaps the majority of hygienists and connoisseurs that fresh meat, especially beef, improves for a certain length of time in cold storage. It is probable that the fresh beef which is served to the people of the United States is on an average a month old, and is said to be improved by keeping this length of time. This is a question, however, which is still undetermined, and it deserves a further investigation. Under present conditions it is well to know the truth respecting these matters and to realize that the fresh meat we get, such as beef and mutton, is not direct from the shambles but has been kept for at least four weeks in cold storage.