Remembering the good old days (part 4)

These are my latest thoughts in an on-going comparison of the good old days to today.  You can read the previous parts 1 through 3, here, here and here.

I remember when food was food, and I mean food. Pure food that had no chemicals whatsoever.  Now the world is so populated that some chemicals have to be put in to preserve foods for sale. But it's not only preservatives.  There are other things that get added - like sodium.  Other chemicals are put in that should not be put in - like colouring to make foods look fresh.

Take for example meats, especially ground meat. Stores add colouring to make the meat look a deeper red.  Some stores even go so far as wrapping ground meat that is a couple days old or starting to turn colour. They will put that meat on sale but with fresh ground meat wrapped around it so you don’t see it until you open it up to start cooking it.  I know it's happened to me a couple of times.  But since it was on sale people would jump on it.  Another thing that some meat packers will add is what they call pink slime in the ground meat

Pink slime.  Can you imagine how great it must be to get that name?

The gross factor: The meat industry likes to call it "lean finely textured beef," but after ABC News ran a story on it, the public just called it what it looks like — pink slime, a mixture of waste meat and fatty parts from higher-quality cuts of beef that have had the fat mechanically removed. Afterwards, it's treated with ammonia gas to kill Salmonella and E. coli bacteria. Then it gets added to ground beef as a filler. Food microbiologists and meat producers insist that it's safe, but given the public's reaction to the ABC News report, there's an "ick" factor we just can't overcome. The primary producer of pink slime just announced that it's closing three of the plants where pink slime is produced, and Kroger, Safeway, Food Lion, McDonald's and the National School Lunch Program (among others) have all pulled it from their product offerings.

Now if this can be done in ground meats what else do we get in other foods that we should know about? And that’s why I'd mentioned in an earlier post 'what are we eating'?

I love meat but I wish I was a vegetarian. Then I would know what I was eating. Then again it would all depend on what kind of fertilizer that would enrich the soil the vegetables were growing in.  None of this was a problem in the good old days.

Well, I was hungry but my appetite just went for a  holiday after writing this.

That’s all for now. Bon appétit.