Question about WholeFoods meat

Factual Questions
1

So I was wandering past the meat area/counter a couple of weeks ago looking at all the beautiful meats available and my eye caught some grass fed chopped/minced meat made from lamb with a beautiful reddish color. I bought 2 pounds of this in separate 1 lb packages. On opening one of the packages, (the same exact thing happened on opening the 2nd package) and spread out the meat to make some hamburgers, that in the middle were areas of brownish colored meat.

Now I’ve been buying minced meat forever, as well as having butchered animals and made mince with an electric grinder, and I am sure that this was not normal. My theory being that some old unsold ground lamb had been mixed with a fresh batch to hide it.

So the next time I chanced to be in the Whole Foods, I walked by the meat counter and inquired about what I had found. “Oh, that’s totally normal,” the guy and his partner told me, “happens because of oxidation in the middle of the meat cut off from air,” he reassured me."

“We get this question about once a day,” he continued.

I am still doubting. So, what’s the straight dope about this?

2

He’s absolutely right.

Myoglobin is naturally a sort of purplish-red color, but when exposed to oxygen, turns into oxymyoglobin, which is a vivid red.

Here’s a USDA comment on it:

from here: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/meat-preparation/the-color-of-meat-and-poultry/the-color-of-meat-and-poultry/ct_index

3

I’ve been seeing this from every retailer for pretty much my entire adult life. Not every single package but reasonably high percentage.

4

Thanks peoples for setting me straight

5

The supermarkets could actually prevent it if they did not use plastic wrap which was gas permeable. They’ve done it basically to allow the meat to take on a nice red tinge from the air which gets in, and convince people that that’s the color it’s supposed to be. It’s also why you don’t freeze meat in the supermarket wrap.

6

There are also ways to handle “red color management” in meats by adding some ingredients:

One is acerola cherry extract, which comes from the namesake wild plant grown in tropical and subtropical regions. Acerola extract, often combined with other plant extracts such as rosemary and green tea extract—both recognized as possessing antioxidant properties–may delay both lipid and myoglobin oxidation. This in turn delays the onset of color loss and maintains desirable color and quality in meat and poultry products.

I doubt Whole Foods would allow this, but meat can also be packaged with carbon monoxide to preserve color:

When meat is exposed to carbon monoxide, it reacts with the myoglobin in the blood giving the meat a bright red color. Fresh beef is naturally red, and as it ages, it becomes brown or grey. The carbon monoxide keeps it looking artificially fresh for up to a full year by restricting the growth of bacteria that proliferate from the increased heat of supermarket meat display cases.

7

That’s actually something different - if they were to use some kind of inert gas, you’d end up with purplish-red meat, just like bardos mentions in the OP. Using carbon monoxide basically keeps the meat looking pink, because the CO joins with the myoglobin making a metastable compound that won’t continue to oxidize, unlike oxymyoglobin, which will eventually oxidize into metmyoglobin which is brown.

In a macabre twist, people poisoned by carbon monoxide also turn red…