An ISU professor has been recognized by the American Meat Science Association for his research on food safety.

The association awarded the Distinguished Research Award to Joseph Sebranek, professor of animal science, who has been analyzing food safety procedures for the past 10 years.

Aspects of Sebranek’s research have involved work on patenting a system to remove hard substances, such as bone, from fresh meat.

“We designed a meat grinder plate that takes advantage of the flow patterns of meat particles during grinding to collect the hard particles and separate them from the ground meat mixture,” Sebranek said.

“The plate has a center depression where the particles collect and a tube which then allows the particles to be removed from the ground meat.”

Aubrey Mendonca, associate professor of food science and human nutrition, said this is a very important system because of potential for bone to cause damage to teeth.

The physical damage caused by a bone can be just as important as damage by pathogenic bacteria, she said which Sebranek has also been conducting research on.

He has been researching ways to remove bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli, to improve food safety conditions.

This removal can be done through a variety of processes, he said.

Irradiation processing and carbon monoxide processing are two processes Sebranek has investigated.

With irradiation processing, one of the concerns is trying to define the conditions that are best for removing pathogens while avoiding any damage to the meat from radiation, he said.

Carbon monoxide processing is new to the meat industry and can help offset the weaknesses of irradiation processing, he said.

A 0.4 percent concentration of the gas can be used on the meat to help ward off pathogens.

The advantage of this new process is the higher quality of the product, Sebranek said.

Mendonca said Sebranek is in a unique position to investigate food safety because he is an expert not only on quality aspects of meat production, but microbiological aspects as well.

She said knowing both aspects is important because he can always check to see how various processes are affecting the quality of meat.