Entirely untrue. In my case, it’s strictly a labeling issue. Once you’ve eaten headcheese, you’ve pretty much established you’ll eat pretty much anything. If I bought headcheese, or haggis, then found out it had been extended with a low cost substitute “meat product”, I’d be upset, regardless of the esthetic appeal of the ingredients. The same with ground beef.
I agree. It should be labeled. It doesn’t need an overly descriptive label designed to chase people away, but nonetheless it should not be sold as indistinguishable from genuine ground meat.
I like haggis. I don’t care for headed cheese.
The wiki article on head cheese made my mouth water, but not in a good way.
Nice username/post combo.
Well why not wash down your head cheese with some delicious casu marzu cheese. But make sure you hold your hand over it, as the maggots can jump.
If you can’t see the difference between eating thinks considered unappetizing in the US – organ meats, tripe, oxtail, etc., all of which are perfectly good to eat – and using industrial equipment to pulverize tissues that didn’t used to be considered food and then sterilizing them with ammonia because of these tissues’ high degree of bacterial contamination, I’m not sure I trust your judgment on food safety.
At least some USDA scientists called for it to be labeled (including the microbiologist who came up with the “pink slime” moniker), but they were overruled by the USDA. It may not be actively dangerous but allowing consumers the information to make our choice in the matter seems reasonable. I’m also concerned because awhile back, well before Jamie Oliver turned it into a big brouhaha, there were reports of meat for prisoners being contaminated with enough ammonia that it was easily detectable by cafeteria staff while the stuff was still frozen, which makes me seriously doubt the manufacturer’s quality control.
It also appears that batches of the product are more likely to test positive for salmonella and E. coli than conventional ground beef (not surprising, because the more individual animals’ carcasses are used in a batch of meat, the more potential there is for contamination to occur.) The manufacturers do test it, apparently beyond the minimum required by the government, and that’s good, but no test is perfect and so I’m not sure I’d be willing to take the risk of consuming a substance that I know is more likely to start out contaminated. The ammonia treatment apparently doesn’t kill off all the bacteria – treatment with enough ammonia to do that seemed to render the product inedible; hence the frequency with which it tests positive.
Likening this stuff to other products that already exist is a poor argument. It’s not the same as organ meat or even mechanically separated meat. It’s not necessarily as safe as those things; saying it is is a false analogy.
[QUOTE=MsWhatsit]
“OH MY GOD people EAT THIS? EWWWWWWW.”
[/QUOTE]
So? A lot of people in this thread seem to be operating under some type of ‘reasoning’ that holds that if people on Facebook distrust the stuff for “incorrect” reasons, that somehow must mean it’s perfectly good for you. But the validity of other people’s reasons for not wanting to eat this product is totally irrelevant.
[QUOTE=Cheshire Human]
This is just an example of people finding out how something they’ve been eating all along is really made, and being shocked by it. I don’t feel the slightest pity for them.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, the entire point is that we have not been eating this product all along; it was only invented and added to our food supply (without our knowledge) a few years ago.
I can’t tell what you could possibly mean by this. The implication seems to be that I have no right to any expectations from any food unless I prepare it myself? I shop the periphery of the supermarket for the most part but that wouldn’t be enough to protect me from buying ground beef with this product mixed in. So in your eyes I “lost my choice” by not slaughtering and butchering the cow myself?
What does pity have to do with anything? This doesn’t even make sense. I don’t want to slaughter my own cows; I still have a right to know what I’m buying. In fact, your entire post is absurd. Why in the world should consumers not have the right to know exactly what we’re buying? People who care about whether our food has certain things in it ought to be able to read the ingredients list and see.
[QUOTE=wheresmymind]
What gets me about the hysteria over this is that it’s portrayed in a sensational manner as this disgusting, unsanitary, chemical and feces-laden trash when in fact it’s processed and treated via methods widely used in the food industry in a manner consistent with other commonly consumed products. As others have mentioned, no one likes to see how the sausage gets made. And I’m sure someone could produce a video about the handling of lettuce from field to grocery store that would make stomachs turn at the thought of a salad.
[/QUOTE]
If that’s really true, then go do some research and make a film or write a book. You’ll make a fortune. I don’t think it actually is true in regard to most of what I eat (which includes both sausage and lettuce). The process of making sausage is obviously not pretty, but having done it myself and having watched films of people doing it, I can comfortably say it didn’t involve anything like this.
[QUOTE=davidm]
I don’t recall the FDA ever telling us that raw eggs or raw cookie dough were safe to eat.
[/QUOTE]
Raw egg is a perfectly ordinary food to eat (and when they say “fully cooked”, that means no runny yolks – so there goes just about every diner breakfast). Raw eggs are a normal part of many foods including a lot traditionally eaten in western Europe. Like mayonnaise. Raw eggs ought to have a low risk of carrying disease. It’s troubling that American eggs are so likely to.
[QUOTE=jjimm]
the usual chorus of horror that greets mention of haggis
[/QUOTE]
Haggis is tasty. “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race” and all.
One thought: if “pink slime” is being produced as a method to extend beef products, one way to solve the problem is to increase beef production*. Really; since about 1975 beef is the only meat whose per capita production has declined; for comparison, poultry has increased fivefold (sheep and goats has also stayed near constant, but also isn’t that popular).
*Of course, make that grass-fed organic beef.
If you’d bothered to read the rest of my post, instead of just the money quote there, you’d find that I suggested nothing of the sort.
Then I don’t really understand what your point was when you complained that some people’s disgust at the thought of this stuff seemed to be for the wrong reasons. A point that a lot of other people in this thread also made.
You have accurately identified my complaint, but not the conclusion I drew from it. Yes, I think that “ew gross” is a stupid reason to decide something is unsafe to eat. No, I do not think that this automatically means that the thing in question IS safe to eat.
Well, that doesn’t really get at the question that was asked, then, in my opinion. You were not, of course, the only person to complain about fearmongering and other people were more explicit about dismissing wholesale any objections to the product.
Actually, looking back, this thread is depressingly short on attempts to actually bring facts to the discussion and long on pronouncements of opinion.
Why don’t you bring some facts yourself then? If this stuff is more likely to have salmonella, show me the research so I can judge it. Don’t give me some NYT article on how prison workers smelled ammonia one time. I’ve never smelled it on my ground beef.
While I’m sure this is the RO du jour, I’m glad that we’re now living where we can buy local and organic meat.
The same article discussed the fact that it’s more likely to test positive for salmonella and E. coli than other beef.
. . . obviously you don’t care enough about the facts to have bothered reading it.
You are right. That article does contain some information. I’m not terribly concerned, but I do think we should be able to make informed decisions about it.
I’ve just been reading about this. In the U.K. we knew it as Mechanically Recovered Meat and I was well warned off it during the BSE episode.
The CDC estimates 1 in 20,000 eggs is infected with salmonella (I’ve also seen 1 in 10,000 quoted). Not a high risk, but there have been problems with folks eating undercooked eggs that were batched. Crack 100 eggs into a big bowl and mix it, and your one bad egg is potentially served to 50 people. Also, if you regularly eat raw eggs, let’s say 2 per week, you’re now eating 1,000 raw eggs over the course of 10 years, your odds add up.
The last ecoli outbreak that made people sick around here was alfalpha sprouts. It seems most of the recalls I can think of are vegetables. The fact is, no food is perfectly safe.
Never. Every time I’ve heard of a recall, the report has always been very specific about what specific type of meat was being recalled. Can you imagine a news anchor reporting simply that “ground meat” has been recalled? People would be in hysterics wondering what they should be throwing away - ground chicken? Pork? Beef? Bison? Sausage? Veal?
Looking at Wiki’s Highlights of major product recalls (1959-2011), I only see four major ground beef recalls. Two of those were E.coli related. All the rest are fruits/veggies, batteries, medicine or machinery recalls.
Reported paulrodriguez who I now see has C&Ped VOW’s post.