I’m not much of a beef eater but if I were to buy inexpensive ground beef, I’d pretty much expect it to contain “pink slime” or other non-premium parts of the cow. Same deal if I buy chicken nuggets or patties (which I’m not sure I ever have) or a frozen dinner including a Salisbury steak, or an Arby’s “sliced beef” sandwich or a McDonald’s fish sandwich. Or cheap baloney or hot dogs (which I only buy for dog treats) or generic sliced lunch meat or sausages…in other words, if I were to buy a meat product on the cheap end of the scale, I assume that what’s in the mix are likely to contain generally undesireable bits or slime.
I still maintain that beef is beef. Whether it’s ground or slimed. It’s not like there’s some old-tyme butcher running sirloin through a hand-crank grinder to make the ground beef you buy at the grocery store; it’s all automated and processed in huge factories (which I have visited.) In fact if they included the slimed bone in pink slime, it would be beef with added calcium and then marketed as such. Much like calcium-fortified orange juice (hey wait. Does that juice contain nutritious slime - how do they add that calcium?)
I must have missed the part where I wrote that Chuck was NY Strip. Let me double check real quick to make sure. I was right. I said that NY Strip and Chuck were both beef products but I didn’t say they were the same. And with that I think I’m done communicating with you on this subject.
BTW what you did do was make an analogy that was nonsensical: NY Strip is not ground chuck even though both are beef was somehow supposed to analogize to beef is not beef.
Again if the problem is that it is not put through a grinder my question remains: “Would you accept it if it was, as wiki claims it is, “finely ground” before it was pressed and frozen? Or ground before placed in the heated centrifuge?”
Cite? Not that I mind hazelnut ice cream. It even sounds tasty and a LOT more expensive than the partially-gelatinated, non-dairy, gum-based treat they serve. But I think something “densely caloric” would have more than 170 calories a serving (Hey! They’re on sale for half a buck and the calories are on the sign.) and a food mostly for kids would have the shit labeled–“DANGER! TREE NUTS!!! YOUR CHILDREN WILL ALL DIE!!!”. And the nuts, like all plant foods, are only part cellulose. They are peanuts. Not the best peanuts Fisher Nuts produces, but not entirely floor sweepings, either.
It is better for you than Lay’s potato chips because it’s easy to eat just one Sun Chip. Very easy. In fact, I’m not eating the first one right now.
I get my ground beef at Joe’s Carniceria in Royse City, TX. Joe cuts off a hunk of chuck roast (that he earlier liberated from a side of beef) while I watch from 5 feet away, grinds it, wraps it up and I pay for it. It’s good. The more you eat fresh food the less tolerance you have for the salty/sugary half rotten garbage they serve in restaurants or sell at the big grocery store. This is not because of snobbery or ideas about health or the environment but really because it tastes so much better. Life is too short to eat crap, ask the man who grew up on Spam and canned beans.
There’s a difference between most of these highly processed goods and what looks like a simple, lightly processed raw ingredient. Even then, my objection is not to the slime but because it’s not clearly labeled as something other than just a piece of meat that has been put through a grinder.
You can call people stupid as long as you want but the vast majority of people simply don’t know what’s in their food. At the same time they are barraged with advertising and propaganda designed to mislead them. What is the dilution? To just dismiss ignorance as the deserving product of stupidity or do you do something that is calculated to make people more informed?
But, no. I actually don’t think the answer to everything is to cater to the least-informed and ignorant (your term not mine) in society. An astonishingly large percentage of the buying public doesn’t care about being more informed and if they haven’t figured out how to read ingredient labels (already readable by your average 3rd grader) by now, they’re not going to no matter how much you dumb it down.
When you have a massive public health problem in society, you have start looking at catering to the least-informed and ignorant in society. The deck is stacked against them by a massive amount. When you’re constantly bombarded by the propaganda of the food industry, you have to start thinking differently about the problem rather than just sitting back on your “average third-grader” type epithets.
And it’s simply not true that things don’t matter regardless of how much you try to make a difference (“dumb things down,” as you put it). For a century, the general population was persuaded by the tobacco industry that cigarettes were (1) good for you, (2) not bad for you, (3) not provably bad for you.
You could make the exact same “average third-grader” observation about that situation. But tobacco was subject to a concerted effort on the part of the government and private parties to inform the public and a lot fewer people use tobacco than they used to.
You look at the situation and figure out what works to produce best outcomes. And if what works best is to dumb things down then you go with it.
For me it’s just representative of the fact that the food industry does things to our food and then markets it to us in a way that for a significant percentage of the population means that they really don’t know what they’re eating much of the time.
Pink slime has not been proven to be bad for anybody, never mind a “massive public health problem.” Unless you are privy to cites I haven’t seen in which case please share.
Well, that explains that. It still seems a bit misleading and unexpected to me, and I’m a label-reading consumer who often defends the food industry and the FDA labeling laws on this board. In this case, my opinion is it should be labeled as such and left for the informed consumer to decide. Just require labeling of “finely textured lean beef.” I just want to know, because whether it’s made with FTLB or not, there’s no good way of knowing. From what I’ve noticed, the brands that don’t use FTLB haven’t seemed to have figured out a way to advertise that fact, as 30% of store-sold ground beef does not contain this beef product, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to know that, unless I know the butcher (as I do here.)
This. My attitude towards ‘pink slime’ is basically ‘so what,’ but when I buy ground beef, I’m under the impression that they took a cut of beef, ran it through a grinder, and put it on little styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic, one of which is what I’m buying.
If there’s more to the story than that, I want to know about it. Then I can decide whether I’d rather pay 5% more for ground beef without pink slime, or take the pink slime and save 5%.
But that’s my decision to make, not someone else’s. Isn’t that how the Magic Of The Market ™ is supposed to work?
Yup, compared to us, the native Americans were wasteful pikers. Processed or unprocessed its pretty much all the same in the end. As my dad would say when every Friday night he served up a casserole of the weeks left overs YSWKTD (Your Stomach Won’t Know The Difference).
Well, I’ve had that chorizo, but they don’t, as a rule, contain glands or offal. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, (except I’ve found these chorizos to be way too watery and fatty and just kinda suck), but a good Mexican butcher will have their own version made with meat scraps from butchering down other parts, or even just straight pork shoulder.
