Raising the
Yuck Factor
I cannot say I am one to be overtaken by food scares
that fill our headlines from day to day but I do worry when the way our food is
derived departs from as it were standard procedures to concoctions that make
Frankenstein plasticine play.
In all honesty, I should be unconcerned with the
uproar about “pink slime”
because I never use minced beef in my cooking and rarely ever eat meals that
have minced beef as part of the ingredients.
“Pink Slime” or to give its it more fanciful name - Lean
Finely Textured Beef – plumbs the depths of sick-making yuck that could have
you filling sick-bags with more than the contents of your stomach.
Taking
science beyond food
As the story goes, some food industry genius thought
after beef was cut off the bone there was still too much being discarded and he
came up with the process of heating the beef trimmings in centrifuges to
separate the fat from the meat, the exposing the product to ammonium gas to
kill bacteria and this is mixed with ground beef in what Beef Products Inc. (hardly
reminiscent of your dear grandma’s kitchen in name or purpose) might have
called the triumph of economics and science over waste.
Reading this is stomach churning enough for my
somewhat rigid constitution but what makes it alarming is the way the food
industry has subsumed the regulators who trot out the idea that this whole
thing is safe.
I will however contend that just because the
processing of food is safe does not mean it is fit for purpose; the safety of
processing must not just be demonstrated but it must be seen to not to take the
Yuck Factor to the point of chronic emesis.
These
unnatural things
Indeed, one must commend Jamie
Oliver [1] for exposing this atrocious travesty that takes the nutritious
and edible out of food leaving it just barely amenable to mastication with our
digestive systems struggling to derive any nutrients before the muck is passed
out our bodies made more susceptible to unknown attacks having not evolved to
the chemistry necessary to process this stuff.
It is bad enough to learn that beef is treated with carbon monoxide [2] to
prevent its natural browning due to rancidity or to note the rise of Frankenstein Sugars [3], but nothing prepared
me for when I read that beef from a cow apparently suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [4] (BSE) or “Mad
Cow’s Disease” ended up in 8 states and the
Island of Guam [5].
What is
real?
There is no reason to touch the topic of Mechanically Recovered Meat [6] if you have not
filled three sick bags already, but when you realise that sausages and chicken
nuggets from conveyor-belt mass-market and cheap outlets do not lend themselves
to traditional methods your begin to wonder what else is sacred about our food.
This is not to say that there is no need to find ways
to improve quality and yield for food products be they plant or animal derived
but the tampering with natural processes to do with colour, texture, taste and
unnatural derivations has to be more tightly regulated and probably stopped,
besides, with the certificates of food-worthiness given by food agencies we are
left to better trust our instincts than allow for these compromised agencies in
cahoots with the Food Industrial Complex to certify products stray dogs might
well sniff at.
Debunking
Myths
According to Snopes.com
[7], McDonald’s stopped using mechanically recovered meat in Chicken McNuggets
in 2003. When I feel better, I might be tempted to try it again.
Sources
