Chemists Design Method to Figure Out What Your Meat Ate
Grass-Fed Beef BinaryApe via Flickr Foodies want to know everything about their animal-based dishes these days - where the meat came from, what it ate, what its name was. OK, maybe not that last part. But there is a big difference between industrial cattle farms and grass-fed meat - both in price and in nutritional considerations. We've already seen how chemistry can help monitor the source of your meals, ensuring that you don't eat endangered species. Now you can tell what your beef ate before it reached your plate. A group of chemists from Ireland figured out a way to reconstruct the diet of cattle, determining whether they spent their days munching fresh pasture grasses rather than barley or silage. Frank J. Monahan and colleagues studied the proportions of stable isotopes of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulfur found in the muscle tissue and tail hair of Irish beef cattle. They were...