Can you eat the beef when it's green? When cutting the cooked beef, it's found that some parts of the beef will be green. Don't throw it away. It's actually an optical phenomenon. But not all the green beef can be eaten, so we must carefully identify the green situation.
Is beef green enough to eat?
It depends. The normal beef is green. It's mildewed. But if the cooked beef is green, don't throw it away. When cutting the cooked beef, it is found that some parts of the beef will be green, which is actually an optical phenomenon. It could be color. Generally, the cut beef is cut perpendicular to the texture direction. If the cut beef fibers are arranged in order, a 'grating' structure may be formed. Light will produce diffraction effect, and various colors such as green, yellow and red will appear.
Have you ever seen a cable? In fact, the muscle tissue of an animal is similar to that of a cable, which is formed by binding one muscle fiber to another. When cutting meat, the muscle fibers are cut off, forming a lot of regular arrangement of concave and convex structure on the cross section. When the light hits the section from a suitable angle, an optical effect will occur, which is called 'reflective grating diffraction'.
So you can see colors like rainbows, from green, yellow to red. In fact, the effect is not only beef, but also pork, lamb, donkey, dog, chicken, duck and fish. In addition, this phenomenon usually occurs in cooked meat, rather than raw meat. If cut along the texture of the muscle, it is not easy to reflect light.
It seems a little complicated, right? Just remember that the principle is similar to the appearance of rainbow. Or when explaining to others, it can also be said that, just like when I was a child, there were many colors on the surface of bubbles blown out, which were all optical phenomena.
Green is not all diffraction, of course, green is not all diffraction. The grating diffraction effect caused by muscle fiber has obvious metallic luster, and the meat itself is not green. If the meat itself turns green, be careful.
For example, after eating the meat packed home in the restaurant, the color turns green, and after eating it, you have diarrhea, which is obviously related to microbial pollution. The discoloration is probably due to the degradation of some proteins by bacteria, in which sulfur elements are released to form yellow green and black brown iron sulfide and copper sulfide with metal ions such as iron and copper.
There is also a special case, for example, it is reported that fresh meat bought by consumers can glow blue-green in the dark. This is not grating diffraction, but pollution from fluorescent bacteria, usually due to improper storage by consumers.
How to identify whether the green light of cooked beef belongs to normal grating effect?
Diffraction effects of light are not uncommon in life, but you are unlikely to associate them with the reflection of the flesh. For example, the color reflection of computer discs comes from spiral grooves. The color reflection of bird feathers, the reflection of insect wings and body surface are all the diffraction effects of feather fibers or scales arranged in the same direction on the microstructure.
If you don't know if the green color of meat is diffracted by light, let us have a simple way to confirm it. Just change the viewing angle a little and put it in the dark. If it's grating diffraction, the color will change or even disappear. If the color does not change, it is likely to be caused by deterioration. Of course, I can't eat it.