Sept 30, 2010: Mystery Meat
 

Ahh mystery meat, the magical ingredient staple in school cafeterias and cheap diners.
What's it taste like?
The cafeteria ladies, and greasy spoon chefs, reply, "Anything you want, kid, name it".
But what is it, what's it made from?
This batch, chicken.

http://cellar.org/2010/mysterymeat.jpg

Yum yum. :yum:

link

Oh God, no more chicken nuggets for me...ever. That's disgusting.

Bubble gum python.

:shock:

No wonder I prefer to buy whole chicken for cooking...
...and I almost never buy processed meat.

:vomitblu::vomit::vomitblu::vomit::vomitblu::vomit::vomitblu::vomit::vomitblu::vomit:

Just like Mom used to process.

So glad I bought tofu today.

My mum didn't put ammonia through it, just her finger nails. :D

That's more mechanically joined than mechanically separated, though......


:vomit:

I'm starting to conjour up images of Sweeney Todd. Uuuuggghhh.

My parents swore there was a euphemism/codename for the human flesh in the pies, but I can't remember it -I'm thinking "Albanian Lamb"? But when i google Sweeney Todd, I can't find anything and googling albanian lamb leads to recipes. Anyway, whenever we asked what sort of meat was in something, that's what they'd say. Perhaps it really was Albanian lamb?

Strawberry ice cream flavour meat please :D

Q: What cuts of the animal are in that meat?
A: Whatever could squeeze through the little holes of the sieve.

Give me 24 hours. I should have an answer.

Ugh! Nuggets has eyes...

Great -a new business op for you! Nuggets can have spex!

Still not as gross as hot dogs.

that's what goes in hotdogs

:eek: SOYLENT PINK IS...CHICKENS!

LOL

I wondered how long it would be before Sheldon was grinning about mystery meat....

No, that would be SALIENT Pink. ;)

You lie! That's a picture of whale penis!

Hey Mabel, one with...
ethyl acetate
ethyl amyl ketone
ethyl butyrate
ethyl cinnamate
ethyl heptanoate
ethyl heptylate
ethyl lactate
ethyl methylphenylglycidate
ethyl nitrate
ethyl propionate
ethyl valerate
heliotropin
hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol)
a-ionone
isobutyl anthranilate
isobutyl butyrate
lemon essential oil
maltol
4-methylacetophenone
methyl anthranilate
methyl benzoate
methyl cinnamate
methyl heptine carbonate
methyl naphthyl ketone
methyl salicylate
mint essential oil
neroli essential oil
nerolin
neryl isobutyrate
orris butter
phenethyl alcohol
rose
rum ether
g-undecalactone
vanillin and solvent

Hold the... 2,4-decadienal and 2-methyl-3-furanthiol.
Watcha drinkin', kid?

One name for human flesh is long pig. I guess this is long chicken.
What a great way to suppress recipe posts.

FTFY

:eek3:

They're just dumping this sh!t into a cardboard box! lol

Nobody would dump "food" into a plain cardboard box.

I think I'd rather eat the cardboard box, plain.

Hmmmmmmm.....

I don't know nothin' about nothin' but this seems fishy.
A quick inspection of the re-bloggers turned up this (from Nik Matt at The Earth Giant (DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if HIS facts are straight but it it seems more plausible to me)
Nik says:
"There is a lot of misinformation in this bullshit. The picture isn’t even mechanically separated chicken, it’s slurry, which exists because Americans think dark meat is nasty (yet love this shit). Basically they emulsify dark meat and separate it from the excess fat and water then flash-freeze the slurry to be transported to plants all over the country that will shape it into lovely patties and nuggets. At no point in time is this treated with ammonia (that happened to hamburger meat in response to e-coli outbreaks and doesn’t happen anymore) and no processing plant would ever put an entire fucking chicken into a sieve to be separated. There are no non-muscular parts, except for maybe a very small amount of tough tissue, in any mechanically separated meat or slurry."

I Googled "Chicken Slurry" and it doesn't look anything like the bubblegum in this picture. Wikipedia wasn't a whole lot more helpful.

I'd really really like to know the source of this picture. Fooducate.com says this about the picture:

"Folks, this is mechanically separated chicken, an invention of the late 20th century. Someone figured out in the 1960’s that meat processors can eek out a few more percent of profit from chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows by scraping the bones 100% clean of meat. This is done by machines, not humans, by passing bones leftover after the initial cutting through a high pressure sieve. The paste you see in the picture above is the result.

This paste goes on to become the main ingredient in many a hot dog, bologna, chicken nuggets, pepperoni, salami, jerky etc…"

And a contributer on Snopes says:
"The article isn't wholly accurate, because MRM (Mechanically Reclaimed Meat) comes from what is left on the carcass after other processing. It's not a case of mincing the whole carcass (only a certain proportion of bones are allowed - depends on your local food laws). What tends to squick people is the idea of non-muscle meat, skin and cartilage in the mix. The description sounds more like steam reclaimed meat from a rendering plant - the whole carcass goes into the process, is pressure cooked and the resulting "highly pigmented slurry" is dried to varying degrees depending on whether you want to make it into slices for sandwiches, into pet food or dried completely for fertiliser.

References:
Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal Is Doing to the World by Eric Schlosser
The Food Scandal: What's Wrong with the British Diet and How to Set It Right by Caroline Walker and Geoffrey Cannon
Meat Machine by Jan W"

I think if that picture is really MRM, it is POST-pigmenting. It is made from cleaned carcasses.
Facts may be gross, but I like to get 'em straight.
Or, straighter.

Thanks for the research, Adam. :thumb2:

Lord knows what that stuff is, but still, much of the time we don't know what we're really eating, (refer to post #25). It would probably be healthier to catch and eat fresh rats or insects. ;)

I never thought I could be turned off by pink meat.

The stuff in that picture is tofu.

If there is anything that I have learned from Classic Science Fiction Films of the 1950s and 1960s, it is that there are some things man was not meant to know.

This would be one of those things.

Einstein's dead, I'm not.

Word.

Mystery meat at a WalMart in China

Yay, Adam!
I was about to go and do the same research, you saved me the trip.
I was certainly going to opine that it would not make good financial sense to pulp a whole chicken like that, when the breast - to name but one part - can be sold at a much higher value on its own.

Jamie Oliver has done a lot of work here, trying to educate people into understanding what they are eating. Personally I've known since 1985, when we had a class in Food & Nutrition in what goes into various pies, pastes and sausages. It didn't put me off, but at least it meant I had a well-informed choice. My vegetarian friends used to try to "convert" me by telling me what was in my food - nothing like a 16 year old to labour a point. They soon learned that I was at least as clued up as they were and could definitely out-gross them.

For even shopper buying chicken parts to cook at home, there's a hundred people buying chicken based stuff (for lack of a better word), usually breaded and deep fried which disguises it somewhat. It's an immense gazillion dollar market, but often cutthroat competition. If they can save a penny on the preparation/distribution of every chicken based blob they sell, they save millions of dollars, and could make or break a company. One of the biggest problems/expenses of chicken processing is the disposal of waste, so the larger percentage of the chicken that can be palmed off as edible, the higher the profit. As disgusting as the thought of eating some of the bits may be, it won't hurt you and it has nutritional value.

Thanks Bruce. That was cool

Now (with a good blender) we can make our own meat patties at home from scratch.

It was an odd "experiment". He kept talking up the grossness, but the only problem with the meat he used was that it is hard to get off the bone using just a knife. It was all from one chicken, the guts and head were removed, and the additives weren't particularly alarming. I certainly wouldn't have any problem eating one of those nuggets. It seems he was relying solely on the idea that meat ground finer than one usually sees (ie hamburger) looks wierd. Plus repeatedly saying how gross it was.

You have to remember he's a chef. They feel white wine with red meat is gross. :lol:

I'm pretty sure the kids thought the meat was plenty gross. It's just that American children are attention whores who will deliberately eat gross things for fun.

But the French eat frog legs and snails.

Without breading, too.;)

Mmmm... fried and steamed with garlic/butter/white wine respectively...
:yum:

I remembered mutton and found several references to it being a Mutton Pie Shop.

I reckon you're right.

So what did you think of the movie compared to stage productions of Sweeney Todd?

I wrote this up last week, then my computer had a spac mid-post and I don't think it made it on to the board (if it did, I'm hoping that smiling nicely at Bruce will do the trick). Seeing as the lives of dwellars will be much the poorer for not having read it, here it is.

This made me think of one trip to Carrefour I made while living in China. (The employees got round on roller blades as the store was so big). At the back in the fish section, there was a paddling pool full of turtles. The poor things obviously knew their number was going to be up very soon as they were scrabbling desperately to get out of the pool. It bordered on heart-breaking. :sniff:

Every time I see this thread title, the commercial jingle for the game Mystery Date gets in my head, but of course it's changed to:

Open the door
For your
Mystery Meat.

Does this game still exist in the states or is it in the same category as the Edsall?

Edsall?

Oh wait, you mean Edsel... yes, tucked away in attics, and at yard sales.

Chicken Deboner
 

Thank god it's not still on the market.

That deboner is enough to give any guy a deboner. Besides the one part looking like a pile of poop, the part with the bristles and claws could probably only satisfy a chupacabra.:smack::drunk:

It wasn't that bad. The styling was adventurous, but that's a personal thing. It was ahead of the pack as far as gadgets/novel features, and way too expensive in a down market, but mechanically sound.

Yes, Spud, yucky. I was wondering why the guy was being so particular about which pieces he fed it?