Does anybody question whether meat is really meat?
Let me explain. I got some chicken McNuggets for lunch today, and as I was eating them, I started thinking about the consistency of the meat in them...because the texture was kind of slippery. And I'm not one of those people who get grossed out by food textures, but it was still an odd moment for me. I thought to myself: What if this isn't really meat? What if we just believe that it's meat because people tell us it's meat, but really, it isn't meat? Who verifies its meatnesss, anyway?
And let's take this beyond McDonald's and the fast food world...into the grocery store. Now, I worked for a grocery store deli once upon a time, and we were right next to the meat department, and I used to like going over there to look at all the raw meat and see what they were doing with it. Some meat was easy to distinguish. It would come in as a big slab, and the guy in the white lab jacket would cut it apart and get blood all over himself (which was kind of gross), and you could definitely tell that, assuming that the giant slab of meat was meat (and it did have bones), the smaller pieces were meat as well. So I believe chunk meat is meat. Generally. If I know where it came from. But I've never been quite convinced about ground up meat, such as hamburger. How do we know that it's really meat? All you see is pink squishy stuff. How do we know that "they" haven't substituted it with some alternate substance that looks like meat and tastes like meat but isn't really meat?
Especially the lean burger. How do they "take out" the fat? I think they developed a fake meat a long time ago, and obviously it's lower in fat because they could make it as fattening or non-fattening as they wanted. We will never know.
So we continue to go through the drive-through, ordering our chicken McNuggets, blindly believing in the meatness of our lunch. Hmm. I just don't know.
Today's discussion is brought to you by McDonald's, the letter "J," and the number 3.
3 comments:
Your suspicions are correct--it's not real meat. Chicken nuggets and other chicken items (like some that you buy frozen at the grocery store) use fillers--soy (McDonalds uses this in their burgers too), rib meat (they never specify from which animal), and even water or "broth" in frozen chicken to take up space and make it weigh more. That's why fast food joints charge more for the "premium" chicken strips--because it costs them more money to buy real meat than it does to buy soy and rib meat (whatever that is). I find the whole thing very disturbing and I always read the label at the grocery store to make sure I'm getting JUST chicken and nothing else. I'm sure they do something similar with ground beef. God only knows what's ground up in there!
If you´d like to move to a ¨developing country¨, you would always know that your meat is meat because you see them cutting it off the pig (or other animal) that´s hanging upside down from a giant hook in the market. The smell is definitely not something that can be replicated in any way, shape, or form, so you know it must be dead animal. :)
Wow, now that's perspective. I've never been to a developing nation, but your comment made me think of the fish markets in Toronto's Chinatown. I can still smell it to this day.
Post a Comment