Sept 30, 2010: Mystery Meat

[Diaphone Jim]

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

[Shawnee123]

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

[Adam]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Thanks for the research, Adam.

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.

[Gravdigr]

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

[Undertoad]

I told y'all it was mechanically separated chicken!

[wolf]

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.

[Wombat]

Originally Posted by Albert Einstein

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

[spudcon]

Einstein's dead, I'm not.

[Gravdigr]

Word.

[spudcon]

Mystery meat at a WalMart in China

[casimendocina]

Originally Posted by spudcon

Mystery meat at a WalMart in China

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.

[Sundae]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

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.

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]