Before John Long applied his expertise to the problem, people tried many ways to make meat more tender — chewing it, pounding it, soaking it in enzymes.

The report, Hydrodyne Exploding Meat Tenderness, published in 1998 by the US department of agriculture (USDA), describes Long's act of creation as "a peacetime use for explosives".

"Throughout John Long's career as a mechanical engineer, he worked with explosives at Lawrence Livermore [National Laboratory]. His mission: preparing the Nation's defence. He always wondered if the explosives he studied could be used for peaceful ends — like tenderising meat. Then, after more than 10 years of retirement and long after the Cold War's end, he began pursuing the Hydrodyne concept in earnest".

The article explains that in 1992, Long teamed up with a meat scientist, Morse Solomon. Their first set-up was "an ordinary plastic drum filled with water and fitted with a steel plate at the bottom to reflect shock waves from an explosion". By 1998, Long and Solomon were stuffing meat, water and explosives into a 7,000lb (3,180kg) steel tank covered with an 8ft (2.4m) steel dome.

This official USDA story of how it all began looks past the fact that another man, Charles Godfrey of Berkeley, California, obtained a patent in 1970 for his "apparatus for tenderising food". Godfrey's first sentence blasts away all confusion: "An article of food is tenderised by placing it in water and detonating an explosive charge in the vicinity thereof".

Godfrey explains his method: "A cut of meat desired to be tenderised is placed under water within a tank. In view of the tendency of the meat to float, it may be necessary to tie the meat in position by a string ... A compressive pressure wave travelling at a speed higher than the velocity of sound may be generated in the water by a means, such as a charge of high explosive, which is supported above the meat by any suitable means, such as the leads which are used to ignite the detonator of the high explosive".

Once the idea was out there, other scientists took to experimenting with beef, pork, chicken, and other things that went boom. A study in 2006 alluded to a scientist named Schilling who showed that "the hydrodynamic shock wave ... did not affect the colour of cooked broiler breast meat."

A pamphlet from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association bragged that the "technology has been shown to improve the tenderness of beef by 30-80% and, the tougher the piece of meat, the greater the magnitude of improvement".

But so far the process works well only for small, sub-industrial quantities. The niggling problem, when applying explosives to heaps of flesh, is how to tenderise without pulverising.

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize