*Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.
McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the “leavening agents”: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.*
And, according to some websites, chicken mcnuggets are 56% corn, and that’s not even taking into account that the only thing the chicken ever ate was corn. I’ll find my copy of the book later and see if I can track down that 56% figure.
I’m not really sure how a crock pot is going to be a big time saver. I looked at a few “simple” recipes online. One had the simple instruction “Put all ingredients in crock pot and cook for 5 hours.” Great. What were the ingredients? 1 large onion, diced. 2 large potatoes, peeled and diced. 2 carrots, peeled and sliced. 1 pound ground beef, formed into patties, dredged in flour, and browned in a skillet on both sides.
Something sitting on the stove for 30 minutes is not where the time goes. It’s all that peeling, chopping, dredging, and browning that takes up so much time. A crock pot just means that you have to do all of that stuff in the morning.
I find I don’t use a crock pot that often because of the cooking time, either. On weekdays I’m gone from my house for at least 11 hours straight. Try cooking most crockpot recipes, even on low, for that long and you’ll have slop instead of yummy food. If you don’t work or only work part time you may not have that problem, but take public transit to a full-time job or a couple part-time jobs (I do, though I’m a suburbanite taking the commuter train rather than a city dweller taking a few buses/the subway) and you may be in the same boat.
Again, this is often a problem that could be helped with sufficient education. Otherwise, ruin a few homecooked meals and those quick cheap frozen things might seem appealing.
Beans and crockpots are both great things, but both take PLANNING. Both take the ability to know you are going to be home the next night.
And both take some basic cooking skills - as someone mentioned above - going through the dried beans isn’t something that really makes a lot of sense if you’ve never worked with dried beans before. Cooking takes some skills AND some practice, and no one on a budget wants to waste a meal because they didn’t rinse the beans well enough and they taste too much like dirt.
In our house, with two parents who know how to cook well and two kids learning, there are a couple nights each week when its “darn, I forgot to pull something from the freezer.” And often one night a week where we did pull something from the freezer, but something happened and now we have a change in plans and won’t be having chicken because we have to eat on the run.
Dried beans are also not going over with kids who have been raised on a pizza and hotdog diet. Which is an issue for a lot of families - the parents have established a diet, and even if they want to change, their kids will put up a fight. Our school district just switched over to whole grains - they served spaghetti for lunch yesterday. It didn’t go over well.
Once again, I reiterate that there are no “bulk fillers”, in the meat at McDonald’s, chicken, beef or otherwise as purplehorseshoe claimed. Of course there is corn as an ingredient in the chicken nugget, because it is breaded, and cornstarch is used for adherence and cohesion, and as part of the batter, which is much different than using it as a bulk filler. The claim that it is a bulk filler to the meat is disingenuous and flat out incorrect. What, are we supposed to be surprised that corn or wheat is an ingredient in a clearly breaded product?
I remember recently, when grocery shopping with my father-in-law, that he objected to paying for a $17/lbs. ahi tuna steak because for the same price as the whole thing, he could get 5 or 6 pounds of ribeye.
Yeah, ahi tuna isn’t the cheapest fish, but he doesn’t ever eat fish because it’s too expensive. He also needs to lose 80+ pounds.
You can often get soda for less per-ounce than milk. Ground beef is regularly less per pound than many vegetables, and you pay extra for less fatty ground beef. Just looking at the local Safeway ad, broccoli is more expensive per pound than chicken.
Of course they take planning, but my point was they’re worth the effort to not only improve your health but spend less money in the end. Who cares if the kids put up a fight initially? If you’re the parent it’s your JOB to take care of them, which includes making sure they don’t eat crap every night. I’m not saying kids should be disregarded, but they aren’t the ones spending the money and they ultimately don’t make the decisions. They’ll get used to whatever they have to eat and eventually that WILL be the established diet. Maybe it will be a hassle at first if your kids complain, but as I said: it’s worth it.
There’s also the fact that a lot of people don’t know how to cook. A one pound bag of beans or brown rice may be cheap and full of nutrients, but if all you know how to do is boil them, you’re going to end up with some pretty bland dishes.
I think ahi tuna is just about the most expensive seafood commonly available, much higher than even dungeness crab or Maine lobster.
Why dosen’t he try farmed catfish ($3.99 per pound fillets) or maybe even wild caught Alaskan halibut ($8.99 per pound boneless steaks).
I have to agree with him, (though I havent eaten any meat of over 15 years) he IS better off (certainly financially speaking) getting some choice ribeyes for 4 or 5 bucks a pound—I would guess that a high quality steak is probably one of the healthiest types of red meat around, as long as he eats a moderate portion and not an entire 6 pound slab…
I agree that the prices in the OP just blow my mind. I live in upstate NY, in Albany. I live in a place with a lot of nice grocery stores and a food co-op nearby and prices are incredibly high in the wintertime. I love, love, love cucumbers and won’t buy them in the winter because I have seen them for as much as $2 or $3 a pop. EACH. I have definitely seen the $3.99 bell pepper.
And fruit is expensive, too. And worse yet, it’s not very good in the winter. It definitely doesn’t taste the same.
In the summer we buy lots of fruits and veggies but it’s just not living in California. It’s just the way it is. Frozen veggies, what ho!
Her point is not correct, at all. She might as well go after the local chinese place and their sweet and sour chicken. Or how about the local breaded chicken wing, or fried chicken joint… or any of a hundred other vegetarian products that use subsidizeed corn, soy, and HFCS.
Worth it to someone that genuinely cares about their health and wallet? I can understand it not being top priority every single day, but I honestly can’t wrap my head around the idea that THAT MANY people don’t think their own well-being is worth the effort, that that many people truly think they’re better off eating frozen pizzas and McDonalds indefinitely.
So the chickens and cows diets are not supplemented by korn (grain/kernels)?.. are you sure about that? These animals are not eating grains of any kind? I’d be really surprised if they weren’t, and it would be borderline cruelty not to supplement an animal’s diet with grain, and practically necessary for meat animals.
I learned to cook growing up, and was fully capable of fixing a full meal by the time I moved out. It wouldn’t be fancy, and nothing like what I eat now, but I knew how.
Even armed with know-how, when I first moved out, I lived on ramen and mac’n’cheese boxes. I didn’t even like mac’n’cheese - but it was really cheap, like 10 cents a box, and was quick and easy. It actually started when someone gave me a bunch because they were moving. I had NO money, and I lived on that crap for months.
I had a couple of pans and a few dishes that Mom donated to my cause when I moved, but no real equipment, so cooking anything complicated or large was way too much work. I’d fix a box of m&c, and a can of green beans (because I knew I should eat veggies, that had been drilled into me) and I was fed for a couple of days in about 20 minutes.
Even at today’s prices, that’s way cheaper at about $5 than $20 a week for fresh food that takes a lot longer to purchase and fix. It’s not a whole lot more expensive than rice and beans, for that matter. And I couldn’t get much in the way of fresh vegetables for $20 here, either. Fresh produce is one of the most expensive items in my food budget.
I also know, from my own experience in other areas, how difficult it can be to learn even THAT you should be doing something, much less WHAT and HOW to do it, if it wasn’t something you grew up with.
