Correlation between meat spoilage bacteria and storage meat in connection with various thawing methods.

Correlation between meat spoilage bacteria and storage meat in connection with various thawing methods. James Poullard and Narayanan Rajendran, School of Natural Sciences, Kentucky State University, Frankfort, KY 40601. The fresh meat and ready-to-cook meat products are safe for human consumption as long as maintaining its shelf life. However bacterial contamination in meat, caused by various bacteria, has tremendous impact on human health. One of the common practices, to reduce the bacterial contamination, is freeze-storage followed with meat thawing and processing techniques. Bacterial manifestation of meat could leads to change of color, faulty taste, odor, and meat texture. Storage of meat could make a difference in spoilage as well as the presence of bacterial populations in the meat. The impact of various thawing treatments used against meat can influence the quality of the meat. When optimal temperature favors the growth of bacteria its thawing process with high and low temperature makes it worse. Hot-pepper marinating strategies, vinegar, and other chemical treatments of meat have profound impact on meat and may extend the shelf life of the meat. In the past, several techniques were used to study the bacterial contaminants and meat spoilage. Understanding the total viable counts of bacteria by enumeration is a direct method to analyze the meat. They were focused on specific pathogenic contaminants like Salmonella and Campylobacter. In this study, we tried to investigate the combinatorial influence of various thawing methods and the cumulative bacterial loads as expressed in log CFU/g through selective and differential media cultural methods. With and without introducing a bias on selectivity of the media and characterization of the bacterial species present, we estimate the spoilage conditions, spoilage appearance, pressure selection on the microbial diversity, and behavior in the meat matrix and microbiota. We analyze bacterial variants and meat matters to improve the quality and safety of meat and thawing procedures including storage and transformation process