NEWS 8 INVESTIGATES

WFAA-TV

The meats packaged with carbon monoxide (right) retained a red color after two months in the refrigerator.

Attention shoppers: Don't trust your eyes when it comes to buying fresh beef.

A controversial treatment used by many grocery chains could fool you into buying old—even rancid—meat.

When it comes to the perfect cut, most shoppers look for the same thing: a vibrant, ruby red color symbolic of freshness.

Or is it?

News 8 went to several North Texas supermarkets and purchased hamburger and steaks. We looked for one thing in particular: a telltale "dome" on the plastic packaging.

Pre-packaged meat is often pumped with carbon monoxide, a gas that prolongs the red pigment. Critics say the practice can deceive shoppers into buying old meat.

Currently, there is no way to know which packages have been gassed because the government doesn't require meat packers to tell you.

So, we took our steaks and hamburger meat and stored them in a refrigerator for two months.

At the end of that time, there was a clear difference in the appearance of the meat treated with carbon monoxide and the untreated samples.

Shoppers we talked with could easily see it, and they assumed that the red-colored meat was fresher.

But that wasn't the case.

Central Market does not flush its meat with carbon monoxide. We asked Greg Smith, who heads the supermarket's meat division, to examine our samples.

Smith, with 35 years experience in the butcher business, was fooled by our test. He said the carbon monoxide-treated meat did not look eight weeks old.

The Texas Beef Council says refrigerated meat lasts only about four days in the refrigerator; after that, it starts to decompose and turn rancid.

Smith said people who buy pre-packed meat should look for two important numbers on the package. "Not only the expiration date, but the day it was produced," he said. "That's very important."

If you have a question about the freshness of meat, buy it directly from a butcher.

The Food and Drug Administration is considering a petition to ban the use of carbon monoxide to treat raw meat.

E-mail jstjames@wfaa.com