On yesterday’s mystery goop,, here (and you’re not gonna like it) is the solution.
Thank you guys who knew and either refrained from answering or merely dropped sly hints.
FWIW, my guesses would have been of the taffy/soft-serve strawberry ice cream sort, along with a lot of you. Or perhaps I’d have guessed it was a joke — something designed to look as if it came out of Barney the purple dinosaur’s rear end — which, come to think of it, isn’t that far from the reality of the stuff.
Eeeeew.
http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/msm.asp
Gives a better (non-PETA approved) explanation of what the Goop is.
Thanks for the added info, Brutus. Good perspective.
Gotta say, though, that even the snopesified version of the story doesn’t make my mouth water. And “certified safe by the USDA” … Uh, yeah. Well.
You have *GOT* to be kidding!! I knew enough not to trust chicken nuggets, etc. but never in my dreams could I imagine it that bad.
This is a great bit on McNuggets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9B7im8aQjo&feature=related
Jamie Oliver takes a group of kids through the process and shows what goes into it to see if they will eat them. What is funny (and sad) is when it gets fried up, the kids of America are okay with them and will eat them.
There are also YouTube videos where he did this experiment in the UK and the kids would not want to eat the final product.
I had no idea. I admit I’ve eaten processed chicken before, and without much thought. That ain’t a gonna happen again!
Truthfully, after some of the things that I have eaten when I was out wandering, I’d be glad to have the nuggets if I was hungry.
I guess it’s like those stupid anti-drug ads that used to talk about all the chemicals that go into the production of meth. You can’t judge a product by what goes into its manufacture. (not that I think meth is good!) If that were the case, you’d never ingest anything. Sodium= deadly poison. Chlorine= deadly poison. Put them together- Table salt= essential for life.
“You can’t judge a product by what goes into its manufacture. (not that I think meth is good!) If that were the case, you’d never ingest anything. Sodium= deadly poison. Chlorine= deadly poison. Put them together- Table salt= essential for life.”
Not quite the same situation here, Kent. This IS a manufactured product we’re talking about, not a food at all.
Besides it’s Sodium that essential for life, not table salt per se.
Even though I don’t eat em, I always wondered where the nuggets on a chicken were.
“Or perhaps I’d have guessed it was a joke — something designed to look as if it came out of Barney the purple dinosaur’s rear end — which, come to think of it, isn’t that far from the reality of the stuff.”
Haha, I was trying to be on my best nettiqette and not make any poop jokes. Toooo easy.
Honestly since seeing that Super Size Me film, nothing McDonalds puts out could surprise me. I used to constantly eat the $2.98 chicken sanwich-between two double cheeseburger creation…now I’d gladly rather eat a neighborhood cat.
Winston — Thanks for your good netiquette. It’s always good to have someone showing a little class around the blog — even if it isn’t me. 😉
I haven’t seen Supersize Me and don’t really intend to because I thought the whole idea of a movie about somebody eating three meals a day at McDonalds was too bogus for words. (Anybody who would do that has a bigger problem than McDonalds & in my not-having-seen-it opinion, any documentary that would focus on that seems to me to be likely missing the point.) But I expect nearly any detailed look at the manufactured food business, any aspect of it, would be pretty stomach-turning.
You can see a mold used to make the nuggets at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakeisbadman/3721610125/
Didn’t see the video. Didn’t have to. Just the picture and the short description were enough. Yeah, as soon as Claire blogged it, I’ve just seen it somewhere else.
In the end though, it’ll get treated like a hot dog, which is where “everybody says” don’t ask what’s in it, you don’t wanna know.
Well.
Excuse me while I go puke, ewww…..
On super size me:
Seeing the guy gain 25 pounds, a messed up liver and ED from eating a super size fast food meal for every meal was about as shocking as cigarettes causing lung problems. I thought it was a pretty damn entertaining movie…keep in mind at the time I saw it I was in 9th grade, spending all my time on nihilist/existentialist web boards and going through my thankfully brief ‘corporations are all evil’ phase that every American youth is required by law to go through now. So it had sort of an effect on me to see a movie with fat people suing a resturant for making them fat, a stuck-in-the-70’s fellow with a tape worm eating his 23,00th big mac and of course all the dirty details on a food industry that made the local sausage factory look like an episode of Rachel Ray.
It’s like everything wrong with western civilizaion in an hour and a half! In fact if the movie had found a way to blame it all on religion and megamalls, my head would’ve exploded all over my HP Lovecraft compiliation book.
Plus I got to hear my classmates say stuff like “That was awful! I’m only eating at Burger King from now on!” Haha.
YIKES! If you think this is GROSS, check-out this story about ammonia-treated beef floor scrapL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html
Perception makes a big difference. Seems the producers of this video have gone WAY out of their way to present this whole idea as unsanitary, gross and unhealthy. And, depending on how it’s done, it could easily be all three.
But so can cooking any kind of food in your own kitchen.
Consider what you get when you stew a chicken until it falls off the bones, then remove the bones, you’ve done essentially the same process as the MSP. All of the connective tissues and other things, including elements from the bones and marrow, that might seem “gross” or ugly are safely stewed into the meat and broth. These elements add serious nutrition.
Why do you think that chicken soup is known as “Jewish penicillin?” 🙂
Personally, I’d much rather stew the chicken myself and separate out the bones. Same for beef or anything else. But I have no bones to pick (sorry for the pun) with anyone who decides to let someone else do it… even by such unlovely means. 🙂
Well, when I first saw this I thought, “Soylent Pink?”.
The Snopes version makes it sound nicer, as to be expected from an FDA-approved perspective; but consider also, even if it’s all hygienic and sanitary, that this “meat” comes from commercial farmed chickens — which I would eat only in desperation anyway. Meanwhile, I buy all my chicken from a local, organic free-range farmer: http://www.polloreal.com (while I can, until S.510 drives all organic farmers out of business).
And, if the Snopes version is correct, I wonder what they do with the rest (bones, etc.) of these factory chickens? Grind ’em up to feed to the chickens, I suspect. Efficiency is all. I gather that’s what’s done with diseased cattle: ground up to feed to feedlot cattle — which was why, as I recall, “mad cow disease” spread so fast.
However such things may be spun from a “scientific”, “rational” perspective — I remember years ago a friend adamantly insisting he could live on some kind of liquid-meal-in-a-can (Nutrament?) because it had been “scientifically proven” to be nutritionally adequate — I believe it matters, well, for spiritual reasons how we treat our fellow creatures, fellow cells in the biosphere. We are all really one body; what we do to “others”, we do to ourselves.
Yeah, I know; I’m a nutcase.
I was vegetarian for two decades in an earlier phase of my life; still would be, but I found I couldn’t survive in good health without animal food. So I eat meat; but I try to do so with some respect for the animals who must suffer and die that I may live. For now, anyway. “I owe the Earth a body; the debt will be paid.” — Edward Abbey
Which reminds me of another recent blog post of interest:
http://tibetanaltar.blogspot.com/2010/09/big-bird.html
Well, maybe not like this, but it’ll be returned to the cycle, not sequestered in a lead box.
Of course, with seven-going-on-eleven billion homo saps on the planet, maybe everything will have to organized as a factory. For what? Factory chickens ground up to feed factory humans. To what end?
Btw, looks like the original posting of this item was here:
http://early-onset-of-night.tumblr.com/post/1206666159/say-hello-to-mechanically-separated-chicken-its
“Civilization is the disease; cancer is the cure.” — Michio Kushi
A few points that interest me:
1. The commercial separator in the video at snopes reminds me directly of the Victorio strainer I just used to make apple sauce and seedless blackberries for jam. Squeezes out the good stuff and ejects the bad stuff at the end. The commercial separator seemed to be producing very fine ground chicken. That doesn’t scare me so much.
2. Re: Supersize Me – another guy made a less sensational movie in response to Supersize Me where he ate sensibly from McDonald’s three times a day. He lost weight and gained health. Lesson? The source of almost anything isn’t the problem or the solution; your choices from among what’s offered are the problem or the solution.
I call BS on the “soaked in ammonium hydroxide” lie!!
here the real article:
http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/msm.asp