Gyroscopic Investing

The dodgy part lies in how the meat industry can put it to use. Meat purveyors can use it to bind together disparate scraps of meat that can be sliced into cuts that look shockingly like whole steaks—thus passing off cheap scraps as pricey cuts. The Ajinomoto site has an image, captioned "Sample Beef Application," that illustrates how four thin strands of beef can be bound together into a piece resembling a fat beef tenderloin, which can then be sliced into cuts that look a whole lot like pristine filet mignons.

Beyond deception, there's a food safety angle here, too. I've written a lot about how US meat is routinely tainted with pathogens, often strains that are resistant to antibiotics. These bacteria appear only on the surface of meat; so when you sear a real steak on both sides, you're also killing those bacteria, even if the meat inside is cooked rare. (Ground meat, of course, is different—since surface area gets ground into the final product, you have to cook it all the way through to ensure that you're not risking illness.)

But in a "steak" made up of several pieces bound by meat glue, surface meat (and any pathogens like salmonella clinging to it) ends up inside the final cut—so searing on both sides won't do the trick. A rare real steak can be a pleasure to eat; rare meat-glued "steak" presents a potential health hazard.