TracyFood

Monkey Monday: so much mystery meat! 29 September 2008 8:48 am

Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, advice, consumerism, food safety, food snobbery, health, ingredients, meat, monkeys, mystery meat, news, politics , trackback

Seriously, kids, was it International “Make Tracy Happy to Avoid Mystery Meat” Week and nobody told me? I just kept finding more and more news stories and blog posts to that effect. Also, on a metaphorical level, the TracyFood comment spam just kept pouring in — I broke ~~16,000~~ 17,000 deleted comments over the weekend (number edited on Sunday morning after I started the post on Friday night). Woo? But seriously, all the scary meat news you can read:

22 September: Sucks to be a factory-farmed pig.

Last Monday, U.S. Food Policy alerted me to a news report about pig abuse at factory farms. The official Associated Press news piece is here, along with a video which I cannot bring myself to watch. You can click through to the full piece without being forced to watch the video, but honestly? With a lede like:

WASHINGTON (Sept. 16) - An undercover video shot at an Iowa pig farm shows workers hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about jamming rods up into sows’ hindquarters.

I think I’ve read more than enough.

24 September: Advice from Umbra

On Wednesday, Grist advice columnist Umbra got a letter from a family unable to make expensive changes like a more efficient car or a smaller house or a move to a city with public transport, who still wanted to do something good for the environment. Umbra’s answer: eat less meat. It’s fun, easy, and cheap! To use Umbra’s words:

The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that if all Americans switched from their current diets to going meat-free one day a week, it would be equivalent to removing 8 million American cars from the roads.

25 September: Unlabeled clones, nom nom nom?

I’ve been behind on reading my RSS feeds ever since I got back from Nepal last year, but Marion Nestle’s blog is one of my favorites (it helps that the posts are short and sweet). Last week she reported about the FDA’s new rules about meat from cloned animals: namely, “aw, shucks, we’re sure they’re fine, so you don’t need to know where the meat comes from.” Yep, that inspires confidence, it really does. Mystery meat just got a little more mysterious! Whee! (Um, pass the lentils.)

26 September: the coup de grace

And then, on Friday, Boing Boing ran a story about the most mysterious meat of them all: a twelve-year-old McDonalds hamburger that’s almost indistinguishable from a burger bought today. Ew, ew, ewwity ew ew! Here’s a link to their source, a food educator who’s been using the aforementioned immortal (ok, zombie is probably a better) burger as a prop in classes for more than a decade. Her words and picture:

The burger on the right, off the paper is a 2008 burger. I had to buy it to get the groovy paper and bag.

The meat is a tad darker, the bun a little less golden but in 12 years it will look exactly like that too.

Do you find this horrifying?

I wonder what Chicken McNuggets look like after 10 years… but, to be fair, I wonder if scary fake soy nuggets decay any faster. Next time I want deep-fried nuggets of golden-brown deliciousness, I’m going for falafel. Maybe even homemade, processed with nothing more complicated than a Cuisinart.

Epilogue

Fear not, readers! There is lots and lots of hope. David “Captain Fucking Pork Bun” Chang, chef at Morimoto, told Esquire his predictions for the future of food: more veggies, less meat, but still plenty of deliciousness. Likewise, Matthew Amster-Burton has some brand-new advice for environmentally conscious meat-eaters reluctantly cutting back on the dead stuff. Also (my shameless plugs, let me show you them), I have recipes for you to try, and I am far from alone.