As most of us are well aware, for years, many meat and poultry processors have been cheating consumers by selling water and cheap ingredients for the same price as meat (or poultry). They have been doing this by hiding ingredients behind a label that typically describes the meat or poultry as "Enhanced" (as if adding water and phosphates and other cheap junk somehow actually improves the value of the meat or poultry).
In a few cases, the injected additives included gluten or other food allergens, and these ingredients could easily be overlooked by unsuspecting consumers. USDA is finally issuing labeling regulations under its Food Safety and Inspection Service division that will hopefully be easy for consumers to interpret (and easier to spot food allergens that might be in the ingredient list). This will of course apply to all meat, and not just poultry. Apparently the enforcement date is still a year away, but the labels should begin reflecting the new quidelines before then.http://www.ofr.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2014-30472_PI.pdfAGENCY: Food Safety and Inspection Service, USDA.
ACTION: Final rule.
SUMMARY: The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is amending its regulations to require the use of a descriptive designation as part of the product name on the labels of raw meat and poultry products that contain added solutions and that do not meet a standard of identity. The descriptive designation will have to include the percentage of added solution, and the individual ingredients or multi-ingredient components in the solution listed in descending order of predominance by weight. The print for all words in the product name, including the descriptive designation, must appear in a single easy-to-read type style and color and on a single-color contrasting background. The print may appear in upper and lower case letters, with the lower case letters not smaller than one-third (1/3) the size of the largest letter. The percent solution must appear as a number (e.g., 15, 20, 30) with the percentage sign (%) and may be declared with the word “containing” or “contains.” Under this final rule, the word “enhanced” is not allowed in the product name. The Agency is also removing the standard of identity regulation for “ready-to-cook poultry products to which solutions are added”.
DATES: Effective Date: January 1, 2016.
And while we're at it, can anyone explain to me why poultry is not considered to be meat? Now I'm just an ignorant old country boy, but growing up in an age when farmers processed their own meat, it never dawned on us unsophisticated country folks that poultry was not meat.
We certainly treated it like meat at mealtime, and it never dawned on us that we were making a grave mistake. The flesh of fowl is certainly not carbohydrate, nor fiber, nor pure fat (though some commercially-produced chickens come close to pure fat these days 
). So why isn't poultry meat? 
That convoluted designation makes about as much sense to me, as calling eggs "dairy". When did cows take over egg production? How did I overlook that changeover? Maybe it happened while I was away at college, but apparently no one even considered it important enough to tell me about the change.
We were so dumb when I was growing up that we got all our eggs from chickens. We always had cows on the farm, but it never dawned on us that we could be getting our eggs from them.
Tex
