Gah! Thank you. Drives me nuts when people think the only costs to a food establishment is the price of the food.
Can pink slime be considered part of 100% beef?
Is it used in McDonalds’ burgers?
well… better look at nutrition info from the McDonald’s website before we decided whether they really use it or not.
There’s also the fact that a McDonald’s burger just isn’t very much meat. A McDonald’s burger is mostly bread.The QUARTER pounder is just four ounces of beef, and that’s pre-cooked. A hamburger can’t be more than two. It’s a tiny, thin slice of a burger with almost no juice in it. It’s certainly 100% beef but it’s well done, thin, and sparing. When you eat the standard hamburger or cheeseburger you’re mostly eating bun. Even the quarter pounder is not much beef.
A homemade, or a well-made restaurant burger, is a really thick, juicy patty. IT’s going to taste completely different just by virtue of the physical nature of the patty - the thickness holds in the juices for more taste and, of course, means you’re eating more beef for your bite.
Actually, naturally occurring trans fats have been found to be healthy; some even want the labeling changed to reflect this (and I have found it to be inconsistent; some beef products list trans fat but others don’t; a quarter pound of beef has about 1.33 grams of trans fat):
Note that artificial trans fats have been linked to the exact opposite effects (increased risk of CVD and cancer).
“Just”? How many ounces would you expect from a quarter-pounder? Five?
But that’s my point. The Quarter Pounder is advertised as a BIG burger, but it’s not. It’s a very modest amount of beef.
That probably depends on your home. As a young tyke, I remember helping my Mom prepare burger patties - we’d weigh out the beef from the grocery store package, squeeze them flat inside plastic sheets made from used milk bags, stack the patties, and freeze them, so that you could just grab some patties for a quick meal.
Which, when I say it that way, sounds like it’s not any better than McDonalds at home. 
And yes, when we weighed out the beef, it was to the 4 ounce line on the kitchen scale - a quarter of a pound.
I wouldn’t call that a small burger, but ‘modest’ might fit. Certainly, it’s not a match in size for a burger that I’d get at Kelsey’s or Elephant & Castle.
Not by the fast food standards when it was introduced. The biggest McD’s burgers at the time were Big Mac and the doubles, both of which used two 1/10 pound patties, or .20 lbs total. The quarter pounder bumped that up to .25 and made it a single patty. All pre-cooked measurements, of course.
Do you consider the original Big Gulp to be a “very modest” amount of liquid, simply because there are now bigger drinks?
Snopes on fast food meat
Fillers are as defined. To my mind they are like the calcium carbonate and silicates we put in the paint and plastic when I worked in those industries. They did little by provide a cheap source of volume. You can see what you painted over with the white paint? Too much calcium carbonate and not enough of the more expensive titanium dioxide. Loads of calcium carbonate does contribute to the fire resistance of electrical insulation. Stone, other than coal, burns poorly.
What might I find if I read the ingredient list of the hot dogs from Aldi’s I just had for lunch? 100% beef? Maybe chicken, mechanically deboned chicken. Soy? While those selling 100% meat hot dogs might call it filler, still it is a source of nutrients. Maybe even some corn? As I understand it, corn and beans contribute a different mix of amino acids helping meet our needs. Are they fillers?
Trans fats. No, they are not widely found naturally, but do occur. Perhaps they have been the problem with beef fat all along. Now once some trans oleic acid gets in my blood stream, how can my body tell it it came from a cow or Crisco?
Binders? Years ago wasn’t there a problem gum carrageen they were using as a binder? People were having allergic attacks. Ah the fallacy of the safety of ''natural products. Been no trouble with sodium polyacrylate or hydroxyethyl cellulose.
There are many, many different kinds of fats, all determined by how many carbon and hydrogen atoms they have (and where the latter are located for unsaturated fat); the trans fat in beef and milk is conjugated linoleic acid (mostly rumenic acid, one of at least 28 different isomers, the natural form is cis-9, trans-11 while supplements may use other forms, some linked to adverse effects). Incidentally, it is also found in human milk as vaccenic acid, presumably because it provides survival benefits. Some of the benefits linked to these include: