Well, almost none of the wild caught salmon in the Pacific Northwest has ever “swum a single damn inch upstream” either. Seeing as they’re caught before getting into the stream.
And if you dip them in chocolate, they’re pretty tasty.
Or so I’ve been told.
A few? You haven’t grown many of your own vegetables, have you?
Washing, scrubbing, yelp when one crawls across your wet, soapy hand, washing, cutting the little bastards out with a sharp knife, more scrubbing, then you cook.
Even better, they have vitamin B12. That and things like rodent feces might be the best source of B12 in largely vegetarian cultures and populations.
Mileage will vary though. I have a friend who works for a State Department of Agriculture, he has ran in his time there both the dairy and the meat lab. Both labs actually had field inspectors who as part of their jobs would take samples of various dairy and meat products from all over the state for analysis. This even included totally finished products (like Breyer’s ice cream right out of the grocer’s shelf) and even soft serve stuff out of Dairy Queen and etc (according to him those self-serve soft serve machines at various buffet restaurants are almost always out of compliance in terms of the bacterial growth on them…Dairy Queen is apparently unusually consistent in its cleanliness.)
With meat they tested things like fat content and etc to make sure stuff that was labeled as 75% lean was at least in the same galaxy as that.
So while maybe the FDA / USDA doesn’t do a lot, I know in at least one state the state level agency does all kinds of random testing of consumer type products where no one is informed beforehand (and since many of these are wrapped consumer products it’s not like they’re going to a farm and need staff on hand, they’re going to supermarkets and buying them off the shelf.)
On the one hand, a lot of people have a strangely vehement dislike of pesticides. On the other hand they get upset if there’s a pest in their “organic” food.
It’s one or the other. Take it or leave it.
I personally have no problem with pesticides, processed food, preservatives, or cow nose in my sausage meat. It tastes okay, it doesn’t kill me, it’s inexpensive, and it allows most* of the world to be fed efficiently.
*It should be the whole world, but sadly there are still some pockets that are not receiving it
Oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit- If you’ve never had locally grown citrus you know they look HIDEOUS! but taste fine. No serious the thing you will get could vaguely be identified as a citrus fruit, expect warty discolored skin though.
Celery- I’ve never seen “USA style” celery except as an import, locally grown is greener and smaller and much more potent in taste. I doubt you’d be able to eat it like they do in the USA, it is cut and used as seasoning.
I think I was very fortunate that my first job out of school at 16 was working in a small town butchers and bakers.
It had its own abattoir and what an eye opener that was.
But the main thing it taught me was to be sceptical of food-shock-horror! stories. Particularly about meat.
Sausages? We made them with the offcuts of pork that didn’t fit neatly into rolled joints or hams for curing, No factory-processing there. All good meat but just not aesthetically pleasing, so into the sossies it goes.
I spent many a happy afternoon carrying severed bullock heads to the cutting room and removing cheek meat and tongues. All a bit too much for the squeamish amongst us but perfect sense if you want to maximise profit.
the tongues were cured and pressed, the cheek meat together with some of the tripe and other head and offal offcuts was ground into dog-meat and sold on.
This is all sensible management of resources and respectful to the animal and if anyone has concern about the meat they buy I’d suggest they search out exactly those sort of small, local butchers.
Word. I’ve always found it amusing-in-a-facepalm-way that we mythologize and admire the Native Americans for “using every part of the buffalo” (which they may have, but they didn’t use every part of *every *buffalo, but that’s another topic), but when we make sausages or pink slime to use every part of the cow, it’s Disgusting and Wrong.
There’s a great reason to not eat pink slime - it makes an inferior burger, producing a patty that is not juicy and has a vaguely “mealy” texture. Yum!
Feast is not the only restaurant in Houston that prides itself on using all the animal. Revival Market makes lovely sausages!
And you should have used that lovely cheek meat for* barbacoa* tacos…
I need to weigh in on the pink slime issue. Sausages > pink slime. Nobody goes to the market to buy pink slime, ever. Nobody picks up a package and hopes to see Lean Finely Textured Beef on the label. Nobody goes to a diner and orders eggs & LFTB patties.
LFTB is a way to take dogfood grade trimmings and turn it into a ground beef filler, that conveniently doesn’t need appear as a separate item on the label. The product has to be hidden in other products in order to be salable. Sausages, not so much.
No, but lots of people pick up a package and hope to see $2.89/lb on it, rather than $4.89/lb on it.
Though, since LFTB can only be 15% of ground beef, and isn’t exactly free, it’s really more of a $2.89 vs $3.09 type of deal.
Agreed, but that’s a little bit of a tough sell in the north-east of England. They look upon pasta with fear and suspicion.
I read your article, and it’s not at all what it says. It says that a large part of the honey sold in the USA is “ultra-filtered”, a procedure that removes pollen from honey, hence preventing from figuring out where the honey comes from. It mentions at lenght that this would help covering up the import of Chinese honey that might contain heavy metals or antibiotics.
But even though it mentions that in some cases honey might be adultered by mixing it with corn syrup, it’s not at all what the article is about or what they were testing. They were testing if honey sold under various brands contained pollen or not. Most don’t. Which only proves that it was “ultra-filtered” honey (according to the author : see below) and untraceable. Not that it contained corn syrup or heavy metals or was from China or whatnot.
Finally, I followed a link to a response to this article by a representant of the honey-making industry. He stated that the author was unapropriately using the term “ultra-filtration”, a process according to him rarely used in the USA for honey and resulting in a final product that wasn’t honey nor sold under the name honey.
He also said that filtration procedures actually used indeed often removed pollen but that the goal was to improve shelf-life (since impurities including pollen result in a darker honey, or a cloudy honey, or in a honey that will crystalize too quickly, all things that the consumer doesn’t want to buy).
Some wild salmon is white. The White King Salmon, super delicious and considered a real treat.
Wild salmons color depends on the species and diet. It can vary quite dramatically.
Don’t eat farmed fish.
I always thought if they could just get enough white kings, with a good marketing campaign, they could sell it for $50 a pound in the lower 48, absolutely beautiful fish.
No. I have no problem with “don’t eat farmed salmon” but the Monterey Bay Aquariums Seafood watch guide strongly recommends several farmed fish:
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/sfw_recommendations.aspx/
I was maybe a little overzealous. Famed fish is not exactly bad but wild Alaskan Salmon is best. The site you linked to suggests farmed salmon in the avoid category.
“Dont eat farmed fish” is among many similar slogans up here. I was just parroting.