A study published in Advances in Natural Science discusses new technology that detects the presence of Escherichia coli (E.coli) in animal meat. Meat most commonly becomes contaminated with E. coli when it comes into contact with feces, which is a completely disgusting thought. While you can kill poop bacteria by thoroughly cooking your tasty steak, wouldn’t it be better if it just wasn’t there to begin with?

Sure it would, but this is Earth and everything here is either filled with, covered in, or made of poop. Don’t throw that steak away just yet, though – Science can at least give you a heads up about the poop germs before you eat them.

This meat probably has poop on it, but does it have too much poop?

The study’s focus is the Cyranose-320, an array of 32 composite sensors that swell up when they come into contact with vapour and then transmit information to a processor that plays a wicked good game of Guess That Funk. The Cyranose-320 (or E-nose) works in conjunction with a “PC nose software program run on a personal computer” to test for the presence of E. coli in meat. For the purpose of this study, that means goat meat obtained from Fort Valley State University’s Goat Meat Research Center (yes, it really exists).
Researchers Ning-ye Ding, Yu-bin Lan, and Xian-zhe Zheng cut the goat meat into measured pieces and placed it into 50 ml jars, some of which were infused with a carefully prepared E. coli glaze and sealed to marinate. After a few hours had elapsed, the E-nose was “trained” through a series of ten exposures to each of the au naturel and spiced up samples. Once well versed in the art of sniffing out the culprit, it was exposed to a bunch more dubious samples.

The results of the study’s preliminary experiments showed that the E-nose was able to detect the silent-but-deadly meat, but its accuracy ranged from a dismal 18% to a still-not-great 77%. On a more positive note, the researchers discovered that the E-nose would retain its training for as long as two weeks.

If the researchers continue testing and fine-tune the E-nose, it could be a valuable commercial or household tool for quickly detecting contaminated meat. Until then, I’m going to stick with my food taster.