Mad about Science: Deli cold cuts

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

It’s pretty easy to take the convenience of the deli for granted. Sliced lunch meat seems like such a straightforward concept: thinly sliced meat from specialty cuts of an animal salted for your preference.

The truth might shock you.

A lot of work goes into creating cold cuts for the deli, including a little bit of deception and clever marketing. Manufacturers’ claims that cold cuts for your sandwich are a specialty cut are meant to maximize the amount of the animal used, thus increasing profits and reducing waste. Most deli meats are actually an amalgam of meats that are bound together to create something akin to spam.

This is apparent when looking at whole chicken or turkey breast from the deli. You may notice that while they slice the meat there is noticeably no cavity for the animal’s innards — as though they bred some sort of mega-chicken and only selected the best part of the breast.

In actuality, this is several chicken or turkey breasts put together. The white meat is cut from the bird and laid out onto a conveyor where it is carried through a number of operations. The first is to inject the meat with brine using an array of syringes attached to a pressing machine. The meat is then sent through a tenderizing machine that works about as you’d expect: using a series of metal gears and weights to beat it and break up the muscle fibers. It then travels through a tumbler that further breaks down the meat and releases proteins that will be used later in the process to bind it all together like glue.

The next step is for the meat to fill plastic cooking and forming bags to create that classic loaf you see at the deli. The bags are sealed and vacuum sealed, then the meat is smoked in a giant smoker. Once smoked, the loaf is removed from the form and sent through a heating tube that browns the outside of the loaf. Those crispy edges you’re used to on your deli meat aren’t the skin, it’s just crispy meat. Sometimes this layer is actually bacon.

After that step, the meat is then packaged and ready to be shipped. Under proper refrigeration, the meat should last as many as 30 days before it expires.

Many of these processes are shared between different cuts of deli meat. Essentially, all deli meat is a combination of cuts where sinew and skin have been removed. Meat like salami uses larger chunks bound together by emulsified meat, leading to unique profiles when making perpendicular slices to the meat.

Bologna is perhaps the most recognizable deli meat in America — ironic, as it was named after the Italian city of the same name but pronounced completely differently. Bologna is often a mix of meats, with 50/50 beef and fat, 80/20 pork and fat and mechanically separated chicken. “Mechanically separated chicken” is an industry term for chicken that has effectively gone through a blender and become something close to soft cat food or pâté. This chicken paste is the most prominent ingredient in bologna, but it isn’t the primary source of flavor. Bologna’s signature flavor comes from the dry ingredients added during the mixing process, which includes salt, sugar, corn starch and mustard.

The bologna paste is squeezed into a 36-pound thermoplastic tube and smoked for hours until the meat is cooked through. Once cooked, the log of extruded meat is sent through a slicer that cuts it into 16-ounce segments ready for packaging.

The red “skin” on your bologna isn’t skin at all, but the thermoplastic casing that formed the meat. You really shouldn’t eat this casing, as you’re intended to remove it before it goes on your sandwich.

You could always just get a different cut of meat that isn’t formed with this casing, which might be a little better for your palate and the planet at once. I am a fan of honey roasted turkey or buffalo chicken, personally.

The process of creating deli meat is closely linked to the creation of sausage. The earliest known sausages date back to 3100 BCE in Mesopotamia. It’s unknown how meats were ground down and compacted together at this time, though it was likely finely chopped by hand or ground using stone grinders like a mortar and pestle or grain roller. The meat was likely cured and then stuffed inside animal intestines that were used as a casing, which kept moisture away from the salted meat to preserve it from spoilage.

This is a process that has been improved upon and scaled to an industrial level in this age. Johnsonville Sausage, one of the major sausage producers in the world, has an annual revenue of roughly $1.1 billion. While there are no publicly recorded metrics of the amount of meat that goes into producing their products, one can use a little math to try and figure out a rough average.

The average Johnsonville Sausage product costs around $5. With a revenue of $1.1 billion, it’s reasonable to expect that the company must produce between 175 million and 220 million 20-ounce products. That means they must produce anywhere from about 275 million to 218.75 million pounds of meat-based products per year.

What a load of bologna.

Stay curious, 7B.