The most common food that I use which *should *give me pause for thought is good old fish sauce.
There is no masking what it is, it is decomposed and fermented fish and salt. Whole fish, guts and all. The fluid that comes off is strained and sold. There is a elegant purity of purpose in the production methods and a pleasing simplicity. I like the fact that something so tasty comes from a pretty disgusting process.
I’d like to go back in time to when someone first realised that their tub of salted fish had been left out in the back garden for three months and had started to ooze liquid. How drunk were they at the point where their friends said “I dare you to…”?
So it should give me pause for thought…but it never does.
The Hispanic groceries in my area sell lard in 5-gallon buckets. I also saw those in “regular” grocery stores when I lived briefly in the Southwest years ago. “Low fat Mexican food” does not exist, if you want the genuine item.
Lard is also a preservative, which is one reason why it’s used in things like tamales and refried beans. Of course, we don’t have to do that now in the States, but our ancestors did, and many native Mexicans still do.
Ever since McDonalds stopped using beef tallow to fry their fries and apple pies, its never been the same.
Also, Spam! Pork…ummm…parts. I love regular Spam, but Spam Lite with chicken added to reduce the fat kind of freaks me out. Same with bologna or hot dogs that have chicken or turkey. They can put the whole cow, organs and all into them and I don’t care, but something about adding chicken and turkey to the mix…shudder. BTW, my solution is to stop reading the labels and just eat.
well according to legend bleu cheese was created when a shepherd or farmer was caught in a rainstorm and misplaced his lunch in a cave type of thing and for some reason the cheese was well wrapped …he found it a couple of months later tasted it and decided it tasted better than it did before due to the newly formed blue (moldy)streaks in it
he experimented until he figured how they got there and sold it to his neighbors ………
None, really, for I have a firm policy of not watching “how your (favorite food) gets made” videos on youtube. Makes for a far less stressful existence.
That’s how cod liver oil was made, back in the day. Nowadays, it’s steam-extracted, but yeah, when advertisers urged parents to give this to their children on a daily basis, that’s where it came from.
Hey, I think I used to work for that company, which bought the company that bought my company, until I got laid off when they went bankrupt because it turned out they couldn’t just buy quite as many companies as the coke-addled CEO’s grand-vision called for. :shakes fist:
Honey is not bug barf. It’s made by an organ in its throat, and then spat out. However, I could see where the two would get mixed up - AND it just plain old tastes good.
That is possibly the most pedantic distinction that I’ve ever seen here: “Well, technically, since the subanstance consumed by the insect and spit back out again comes from an organ in the throat and not from the stomach several millimeters away, you shouldn’t use the humorously colloquial term ‘barf’.” Gotta say, I expected the nitpick to be that bees don’t belong to the order Hemiptera.
You may be working from old information there. I recently visited the Bombay Sapphire distillery, which is in Hampshire, quite some distance from Wales. The distillery is in what was originally a paper mill which sits on the banks of the River Test, from whence they draw all their water. The river is a chalk stream from its source through that stretch which makes for incredibly clear water.
I suppose “some reservoir in Wales” doesn’t necessarily conjour up images of great beauty. I mean, look at this monstrosity
As for the OP… There’s not much I won’t eat; black (blood) pudding, haggis, liver, even tripe. Love it all. But for no logical reason, I don’t think I could bring myself to eat brains. Nope. No Sir.
