There’s a YouTube video making the rounds that exposes one of the unsavory little secrets of modern food production. It’s an Australian news magazine-style report on transglutaminase, a food additive enzyme sometimes known as “meat glue.”

Meat glue allows butchers to bind together scraps of sub-par meat to make them look like high-end steaks. It’s apparently commonly used in processed meats, dairy products (because it makes them taste richer) and imitation crab. It’s a naturally-occurring enzyme, and can be cultivated from bacteria or derived from the blood plasma in pigs and cows. 

Despite the fear-mongering in the video, it doesn’t sound like transglutaminase poses any real danger. I first learned about it from this post by Primal Living author/blogger Mark Sisson, who concludes that meat glue shouldn’t provoke as much fear and loathing as the video suggests, but advises that you quiz the butcher about whether there’s any “glue” in your meat and, if there is, be sure to cook it well. It seems that one possible risk to glued-together meat products is that if you cook one of these fake steaks to medium rare you may be exposed to dangerous bacteria.

And transglutaminase isn’t only used in cheap, low-quality foods being passed off as something else. It’s also a pantry staple for chefs devoted to molecular gastronomy, a foodie movement that’s taken hold in certain high-end restaurants, where they aren’t using “meat glue” to cut corners but to invent cool new dishes that seem like they came from a chem lab rather than a kitchen.

But even though it’s probably not dangerous, I find transglutaminase disturbing  because it lurks in what we usually consider “whole” foods. When I’m eating a packaged snack food I accept that the ingredient list is loaded with additives with names I can’t comprehend. That’s just the deal with processed snacks, and that’s one reason we (ideally) avoid them when we can. But when you’re eating meat or milk you expect it to be undoctored, right?  Even if it’s not organic or hormone-free, even if the animal it came from lived in a factory farm, you assume that your meat or milk isn’t laced with powders with strange names. Well, now we know that that assumption is false—something to think about the next time we’re tempted by fast food, which I imagine contains a lot of this stuff. 

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