Public Biography
Dr. Marguerite Sable is a food scientist and the director of the Institute for Applied Protein Recovery in Battle Creek, Michigan, a position she has held since 2014. She holds a doctorate in food science from Iowa State University and spent eleven years in the rendering and by-product divisions of the meat-processing industry before moving to research and standards work.
Dr. Sable is among the country’s foremost defenders of mechanically recovered protein — the slurries, separated tissues, and reclaimed streams that the public tends to encounter only through alarmed nicknames. Her central scholarly position, advanced across two decades of papers and one trade book, The Honest Remainder (2019), is that disgust at such products is cultural rather than nutritional, and that “the squeamishness of the well-fed” has done measurable harm to food security and to the rational use of edible material.
She is a frequent and weary presence in news coverage of food scares, where she is typically asked to confirm that something sounds bad and instead explains, at length, why it is fine.