...to stop eating meat, or at the minimum radically reduce the amount in your diet. As if the environmental impact, the negative health effects and the concentration-camp-like conditions at factory farms and slaughterhouses were not enough.

Why not raise your own? Cats, dogs etc. all should be fair game in an urban environment to supplement one's diet with fresh protein. /sarcasm

Shouldn't we stop eating vegetables, as well? After all, there have been contamination issues with them and their mass production also harms the environment. Plus, there's the overworked and underpaid workers in the fields. There's no easy answers.

It doesn't affect shelf life, but without it, the meat starts turning dark red to brown as oxidizes. Consumers don't like this discolouration even though it does not affect quality - in fact aged beef is considered superior.

So making it look better results in less meat being tossed for spoilage - decreasing the number of factory raised cattle required to sate our appetites.

their mass production also harms the environment.

Their mass production harms the environment far less than that of meat, in that producing meat also requires the production of grain to feed it, and far more of it than if the grain were consumed directly.

As far as health issues, either can be contaminated. But the #1 killer in America is not food contamination, but heart disease, which is directly linked to the consumption of animal fats.

Finally, for those who care, there are animal cruelty issues associated with factory farms that obviously do not apply to vegetables. Factory farming is so awful that even conservative thinkers have lately been taking note. Check out the book "Dominion" by former GWB speechwriter Matthew Scully for example.

Cutting back or eliminating meat may not be an easy answer, or a complete answer. But it's certainly an outstanding answer to several things.

I like a steak or a burger as much as the next day, and I'll likely never be 100% vegetarian. But I've decided I'll no longer eat meat unless I know how it lived, how it died, and how it was handled afterwards.

Aged beef is indeed considered superior BUT shrink-wrapped ground beef does not come close to being 'aged beef.'

Instead, it could perhaps be considered 'slightly rotten indeterminate beef parts.'

I would argue for better forecasting & predictive measures by supermarket chains to reduce the waste of beef spoilage. That would certainly be more ethical than misleading customers, and perhaps simpler too.

"making it look better" by adding harmful ingredients is criminal. You must think it OK when the Chinese intentionally poisoned pet food with synthetic compounds to artificially and fraudulently raise the protein rating. Or for them to intentionally put anti-freeze in toothpaste and cough syrup.

but using CO to retard oxidisation, doesn't kill if Best Before dates are used. Only if they tried selling it past expiry because the meat "looked fresh" would I say it is a harmful practice, and one the store manager would be responsible for, not the meatpacker.