My beeef with beef

 

I’ve written before about what disgusting things are added to some of the food we buy in the super markets. Today I decided to revisit the food issue. Do you eat beef? Do you like beef? I used to like beef.

That is, until I read this:

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...

Besides a hefty dose of protein, a 2010 report from the United States Department of Agriculture found your beef could also harbor veterinary drugs like antibiotics, Ivermectin, an animal wormer linked to neurological damage in humans, and Flunixin, an anti-inflammatory that can cause kidney damage, stomach and colon ulcers, and blood in the stool of humans...

Thought to proliferate on factory farms where antibiotics are overused to boost animal growth, a January 2012 study from Iowa State University found that the dangerous organisms wind up in supermarket meat, too. The dangerous MRSA strain lingered in 7 percent of supermarket pork samples tested. The bacteria die during proper cooking, but improper handling could leave you infected.

I get the impression that the alarmism on this particular website has an agenda to turn everyone vegan. Now I will not give up on eating beef but I think as consumers we need to be careful about what we eat and knowing this information allows us to do just that. And that is the real issue - we need to know these things to make informed choices.

As I've mentioned before, when we do grocery shopping we buy the foods that are presented to us in these markets we are buying in good faith. Yet it seems that we are being seriously deceived by the producers of some of these foods. One thing I believe is that most of the sicknesses that we have today are brought on by the garbage that we ingest each time we eat. This brings me to what I have been saying all along.

We don’t know truly what we are eating without knowing what has been taken out or added to these foods. I think it’s time to stop talking about what we eat and start demanding full disclosure about what is happening to the foods we buy before we buy them. Some people will say eat lots of fruits because they're. Sure they are safe, if you can manage to wash off all the pesticides that was sprayed on them. It's still the same issue - what has been done to the fruit before it got to your supermarket shelf?

We just can’t win, the beef is full of drugs and the pork full of fat. I hope you’re not having beef sandwiches for lunch. If you are you should have read this after lunch.

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.