The “Wal Mart is evil” thread reminded me to post about something that has pissed me off for some time now. It’s only tangentially related to Wal Mart, but since Wal Mart started selling groceries around here, two major grocery stores closed up shop completely, and a few smaller local stores did too. Now all that is left is Wal Mart, Albertson’s, and a couple of independent stores. This leaves us with only a few choices for groceries, and I’ve noticed all of them are trying to piss me off.
What the heck is up with injecting pork with water, sodium phosphate, salt and lord knows what else? Every store in town carries the same pre-packaged pork cuts (though not necessarily from Tyson) but all of them have been tainted with this vile tasting solution. No plain pork is available; all of it is packaged like this. I asked the butc…, er, the minimum wage meat product stocker at Wal Mart if they had any plain pork. After explaining what I meant to him, he said no, it all was like that but “it tastes better with it”.
Tyson says that “Simply stated, Supreme Tender is the kind of pork demanded by today’s consumer.”
That can’t be true, can it? Please tell me that you prefer unadulterated pork instead of this salty crap that they are trying to sell. At the very least, you aren’t demanding it, are you?
I’m not sure that this is what you mean, but I bought a “marinated” pork tenderloin a couple of weeks ago. It was so salty that I was unable to eat it. It was not only salty but also very “artificial” tasting. I’ve not noticed the same with other cuts of pork like cutlets. Ham is, of course, an entirely different matter.
If you add 10% of the weight as salty water then you make money by charging the same per pound as for better pork. You can then undercut your competitors who sell better pork and your competitors die out. Meanwhile people who don’t know how to season the pork they cook find the injected pork tastier because it has salt allready added.
I know exactly what you mean. It’s almost the same situation here - every store except one local grocery store sells that icky injected pork.
My WAG? Consumers have demanded lean cuts of meat, sacrificing taste. Pork - traditionally a somewhat fatty meat - has become so lean that people think it doesn’t taste right unless it’s bathed in salt and preservatives.
people these days really do overcook pork, out of a (unreasonable IMO) fear of food-borne illness. Adding a saline solution to the meat helps it retain some moisture after being cooked to death
and
pigs these days are bred to be waaay leaner than they were in the past. Lean meat tends to be tougher and loses more moisture during cooking, especially over-cooking.
I think this is at least partially in response to consumer demands for very lean pork with no marbling. The meat packers inject it with saline solution to give it some chance of not being dry, chewy and flavorless after the consumer cooks it.
Add to that the fact that it does increase the weight of the meat a little and you’ve got a very attractive maneuver, in the eyes of the meat packers.
The meat packers get to sell a product that looks & tastes better after it’s cooked, and which is a little heavier when it’s sold.
I prefer my pork without chemicals, thank you. Luckily I live close enough to Berkeley to get the good stuff. I feel for you people out there. I guess you could order your meat on the internet?
What gets me is the inability to find whole chickens that don’t contain “seasoned broth to enhance flavor”. I just want the meat- not “flavor additives.” Your enhanced flavor can make certain onion-allergic people very sick.
Can you tell I was just at the grocery store? I’m not bitter- I just want a chicken I can eat, dammit!
And salty pork? Can’t meat taste like, I don’t know, meat anymore?
I certainly don’t want that crap, and I’m definitely not looking to feed it to my child. So I’ve pretty much gone completely to shopping at Whole Foods Market. The food is more expensive, but we are trying to eat less anyway, so buying a lower volume of higher quality is working out fine budgetwise.
As a matter of fact, I’ve got a pork loin roast in the fridge right now. It’s unadulterated and lovely. It’s even wrapped in butcher paper, rather than soaking up phthalates from plastic wrap.
I bet dryness is a big problem with the new leaner pork. But the solution is easy - get a $20 remote probe thermometer, and take out the roast when it’s within five degrees of safe temperature. Succulent!
As far as I’m concerned, it’s adulterated, not enhanced.
Luckily, I have a lot more choices in this area than you do, and it’s very easy for me to find meats that haven’t been pumped full of crap. If I didn’t, though, I’d quit buying meat anywhere but the natural foods store.
Here in Ireland, when you’re cooking ‘bacon’ (a big roll of gammon-style meat), you have to soak it for several hours and change the water several times to get rid of the salt before cooking. I presume this must have been injected for preservation purposes. However, I think this is a traditional preparation.
However, the meat one gets from the supermarket is disgustingly watery. You can’t fry or braise anything without buckets of water leaching out in the frying pan. It really pisses me off - firstly because I know I’m being ripped off, but worse, because it lowers the quality of the food - everything is boiled before it’s fried. As a consequence, we now only ever buy meat from the butcher near the supermarket. Not a drop of water comes out of the meat, and it tastes about ten times better. And, surprisingly, it’s cheaper.
The 27th Evil: look to see if your supermarket has a kosher meat section. In most supermarkets it will be tiny (if it exists at all) and at one end of the meat case or in a separate case altogether. I really like kosher chickens. They aren’t injected with anything, as far as I can tell, and they taste like actual chicken, rather than like nothing, like the Purdue & Tyson chickens.
Butcher shops are also a place to check out if you can find one - not always easy outside urban areas.
S’funny this should come up. We had a ‘marinated’ pork loin last night (And I’ve got the leftovers in my lunch bag for today.) I’ve yet to find a mass-marinated cut of meat I actually like (short of sausage…nearly named my first born ‘Johnsonville’)
Our small town got sucked up by Metro Denver over the last decade or so. We just got big enough to support a Butcher. I can’t afford to go in there often, but when I do, I’m ALWAYS impressed with the improvement in quality over the grocery stores/Walmart meat.
To add to the disgust, the solution they inject sometimes has gluten in it. People should be able to eat meat that is meat, not meat with flour additives! Wal-mart does this with many of their meats, making it not safe for people with food alergies.
