If you eat any kind of ground meat product, whether it be potted ham or a nice sausage, you’re possibly going to be eating some questionable things. If it tastes good, it tastes good and unless something’s toxic, it’s best just not to think about what’s in it.
I seem to remember a saying that goes something like, “Never watch sausage or laws being made if you have a weak stomach. You really do not want to know what goes into the making of either.”
Some of my friends and I once had a competition to see who could read the whole list of ingredients from a potted meat food product without giggling.
Believe me that the contents of SPAM, the king of potted meats, is worse!
Cecil disagrees
Potted meat = puree of Lips and Assholes.
Lttle kids ought-not to tawlk lIk-dat!.
uh-humm, dem, potted meat products are a little loud…[/swing blade]
Nonsense. I have a can right here at my desk. (Running joke with a co-worker)
Ingredients: Pork with Ham, Slat, Water, Modified Potato Starch, Sugar, Sodium Nitrate.
I don’t particularly like the stuff, but I certainly don’t find the ingredient list to be frightening.
And as for mechanically separated chicken, my response is “eh.” I trust machines to do all sorts of things. If they mince, grind, or separate my food, I’m not going to complain simply on that basis. But then again, I like a wide variety of food, ranging from cooked-from-scratch recipes handed down through many generations all the way to commercially processed, extruded, reconsituted, chemically laden junk food.
Salt! Salt! Not slat. Sheesh.
[P. Allen Smith]
After potting your meat product make sure it gets plenty of sun, daily waterings and a weekly dose of a balanced fertilizer. This will help produce lush, green growth.
[/P. Allen Smith]
Whenever I hear the phrase “mechanically separated chicken” I picture a chicken carcass on a conveyor belt with all these little steel robot claws nipping bits off it while Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse plays in the background.
Powerhouse is the “factory music” in old Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes cartoons.
“Mechanically deboned meat” was added to our vocabulary a few years back, due to advances in meat-munching machinery and advances in influence-buying techniques. There are at least three types of deboning machines:
The water-blasting method mentioned in a previous post is one.
Another is to cook the carcass and squish it in a press. What comes out the little holes is MDM.
The third one is very similar to a rotary paint stripper. There’s a hub with sharp-edged flails. When you use the paint-strip version (I have one that chucks into a drill,) it knocks off loose paint chips, but it sometimes digs out little pieces of wood. The meat version knocks off bits of meat, but it also digs out some bone chips. Now, I admire the efficiency, but I don’t like bone chips in my food.
I love potted meat. Fixing to have it for lunch. Great stuff!
Total depth of 460 feet?
“If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” ATTRIBUTION: Widely attributed to OTTO VON BISMARCK. ( www.bartleby.com )
Heh, and I was going to say it’s the slat that makes it bad. 
My apologies to SPAM likers everywhere. It must have been some other potted meat that I read the ingredients and cringed. I plead a moment of Sometimer’s Disease* for my previous post.
*Sometimes you remember (correctly) and sometimes you don’t.
I prefer Soylent Potted Meat, myself. It’s become very popular in Chicago of late.
Hmm. Curiously, at the same time the population started to drop. How odd.