Chilled meat is rich in nutrients but highly susceptible to contamination by spoilage microorganisms during slaughter, processing, storage and transportation. Microbial spoilage in foods has become a major concern for food safety. Predictive models for microbial growth in foods can judge the growth or survival of major spoilage microorganisms in foods, thereby allowing the evaluation and prediction of the quality and safety of meat. The artificial neural network (ANN), a complex nonlinear model, has the advantages of massively parallel processing, distributed storage, high adaptability, and fault tolerance. This paper reviews the main spoilage microorganisms in chilled meat and the application of traditional microbial prediction models and ANN models in meat to provide ideas for constructing microbial growth prediction models in foods.

In recent years, fermented meat products have become very popular among consumers due to their nutritional benefits and good taste, but biogenic amines often present in fermented meat products have also triggered concerns about their safety. Biogenic amines are a class of bioactive, low-molecular nitrogen-containing organic compounds, which in the right dose range can help human growth and enhance metabolism, but excess biogenic amines can lead to adverse effects such as allergy, diarrhoea, teratogenicity and even death. This paper reviews three mechanisms by which Staphylococcus reduces biogenic amines in fermented meat: oxidative amine reduction by biogenic amine oxidase, production of staphylococcin by the strain, and synergistic effects with other strains. The amine-lowering effect of Staphylococcus will be useful for the prevention, control and elimination of biogenic amines in food products.

To investigate the effect of combined high-voltage electrostatic field (HVEF)-ozone thawing on the quality of frozen pork, we compared the effects of thawing in a refrigerator at 4 ℃ with the assistance of HVEF (10 mA and 4000 V), ozone treatment (64.5 mg/m³ for 30 min) and their combination on the total plate count, moisture content, thawing loss, color, texture, microstructure, total volatile basic nitrogen (TVB-N) content, thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) value, and volatile flavor compounds of frozen pork using fresh pork as a control. Frozen pork treated by HVEF combined with ozone showed the shortest thawing time of 2 h. The combined treatment significantly reduced the microbial load, thawing loss, TVB-N content, and TBARS value of pork, effectively inhibited the formation of metmyoglobin and fat oxidation, and maintained the color, water retention, texture properties and muscle structure integrity. In addition, this synergistic treatment altered the composition of volatile flavor substances by increasing the relative contents of aldehydes, alcohols, and alkenes, and produced several new flavor substances, mainly alcohols and ketones, which contributed significantly to the overall flavor formation of pork after thawing. In conclusion, HVEF-ozone thawing has significant advantages with regard to thawing efficiency, physicochemical indices and volatile flavor substances.