A) Strawberry ice cream
B) Chicken
C) Plastic foam
D) None of the above
Answer below
What you need to know:
You may want to rethink that McDonald's Chicken Nugget or Chicken Sandwich. Folks, this is mechanically separated chicken, an invention of the late 20th century. Someone figured out in the 1960′s that meat processors can eke 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.
What they do is take parts of a chicken and put it through this machine that mechanically separate the meat from the bone. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. What it does instead is smash EVERYTHING including the bones, eyes and guts making it come out looking like the picture above.
Since this meat is infested with bacteria, it will be soaked in ammonia in order to kill those little critters. But who wants ammonia nuggets? Not I and I’m sure you don’t want any either. So in order to mask the ammonia taste, they season it with a ton of artificial flavors.
This paste goes on to become the main ingredient in many a hot dog, bologna, chicken nuggets, pepperoni, salami, jerky etc…
The industry calls this method AMR – Advanced Meat Recovery.
In 2004, as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) ruled that beef could no longer be processed this way, because testing showed that parts of the bovine central nervous system ended up in the meat.
As for products using mechanically separated chicken and pork, FSIS ruled that they are safe to eat, but required them to be labeled as such.
Despite them being safe, FSIS states that no more than 20% of the meat in a hot dog come from mechanically separated pork.
What to do at the supermarket:
It’s always a better to choice to see a real cut of meat at the butcher counter in the supermarket and then decide what you want done with it. Buying something prepared in a factory, such as chicken nuggets, or hot dogs, you’ll always get the worst meat, and it will always be combined with additives and other sources of fat.
Sierra Club85 2nd St.
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