Slashdot Mirror
How Much Beef Is In Your Burger?
dgharmon writes in with an interesting article about how much (or how little) beef is in a UK burger. "The presence of horsemeat in value beefburgers has caused a furore. But what is usually in the patties? It has been a sobering week for fans of the beefburger. Tesco have used full-page adverts in national newspapers to apologize for selling burgers in the UK that were found to contain 29% horsemeat. Traces of horse DNA were also detected by the Food Standards Agency of Ireland in products sold by Iceland, Lidl, Aldi and Dunnes. But a beefburger rarely contains 100% beef."
"Two all beef patties on a sesame seed bun!" Their commercials say it, it must be true.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I eat wild game that I harvest myself.
Mmm... unlisted percentages of wheat flour, water, beef fat, soya protein isolate, salt, onion powder, yeast, sugar, barley malt extract, garlic powder, white pepper extract, celery extract and onion extract...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would purchase them again today.
Horses are not especially more intelligent than cows.
I make burgers out of 100% beef and they are not steak
I bought some value burgers from Tesco's yesterday, and they're off!
@Freddie_UK: A woman has been taken to hospital after eating horsemeatburgers. Her condition is said to be stable.
@BobJWilliams: I expect this only relates to those mini-burgers you have as snacks. You know, the horse d'oeuvres.
@JohnMoynes: I get all my horsemeat from an independent dodgy butcher.
@DiamondsIRL: Are you in favour of Horsemeat in your burgers? Yay or Neigh?
@GBretman: So horsemeat has been found in TescoProducts but a spokesman says It's bollocks
@pinkyperfection: I had a tesco burger and now I'm feeling a little horse
@brucel: Those Aldi horse burgers were nice, but I prefer My Lidl Pony
@PaulLewis: Scientist: "Sir, we've discovered horse meat in your burgers." Tesco boss: "Why the long face?"
@PensionsMonkey: There was an old woman who swallowed a horse, she'd been to Tesco, of course.
@elhaydo: Good thing about these horse puns is it's stopped all the sick Jimmy Saddle jokes
The best #horsemeat Twitter gags following Tesco burger blunder
Deceptive trade practices is the problem.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And you don't have to worry about any of this BS.
Ground beef is still beef. Plus there is a difference between filler junk, and non-beef meat.
While I don't have numbers at hand, it is my understanding that there are very few horse slaughter facilities in North America. There is a certain horse culture that are very opposed to seeing any horse slaughtered, even for food.
So it was actually called the "Big Mr. Ed Burger" for a reason. I thought the name was the chef who invented it, not the actor that ended up in the first 91 copies. Chalk up one more mystery solved by teh intertubes.
-Charlie
Actually horse meat is pretty good; I like it more than beef, and around here the price is comparable. It's tastier than beef, and also has fewer adverse consequences for your health. Horse meat becomes more tender as the animal ages - unlike cattle - and a rather larger percentage of the animal is good meat (although each horse eats more than cattle yielding similar meat mass). Of course, horses are often though of as companion animals, (disclaimer: I own and ride a horse) and it's not customary to eat any animal you gave a name to. Our horse has a name, and the kids would not tolerate any discussion of eating him...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So nothing in there but beef? How does it all stick together?
"If it were 100% beef it would be a steak."
"Steak" is the way the meat is cut, not what kind of meat it is. There is pork steak, salmon steak, etc.
100%, grass-fed on my acreage with no hormones, steroids, or antibiotics - processed in town by a local processor for $0.60/lb + a $50 kill fee, which includes vacuum packing and freezing.
Hi have no problem with the idea of eating horse meat, but I'd like to know in advance. Advertising your horse burgers as having '100% beef' is hardly fair warning.
Sawdust. 100% Natural.
At least that what it seems they use in the US.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Love keeps it together.
I know they put some fillers (soy protein, wheat, water, etc.) and flavoring (onion, celery, etc.) in my hamburger meat. I'm fine with that. But if you're selling me beef burgers, then I want the meat parts to be beef. I have no particular gut reaction against eating horse and it can actually be tasty to mix a little pork into ground beef; I just think they should be honest about what they are selling.
It just comes down to honesty.
Generally speaking, a beef patty that's 100% beef has to be stuck together with fat. In other words it's unhealthy AND pretty tasteless.
Sorry, turning a decent steak into a burger makes no sense without additives. The way to treat a steak is to pocket it and fill it with blue stilton, not slobber it with mayo and red sauce.
a beefburger rarely contains 100% beef.
... and a hamburger rarely contains 100% ham.
Dont't get it, meat is meat, and with spices on it'll taste the same. If people get upset by horsemeat, cowmeat , dogmeat or whatever, maybe they shoudln't eat meat at all.
Beef fat.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In the US awhile back there was a scandal involving something called pink slime which was added to ground "beef". TV news showed this stuff's manufacture out of leftover parts of who knows what. Watching the making or sausage or laws might have been less disgusting. Horse meat might be better than this stuff.
In the Western US there is also major concern about the round up of wild mustang horses for slaughter for dog food. Maybe some of them ended up in British grocery store raw burger.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I believe the article was referring to the UK. I don't know what the laws are there, but here in the U.S., a company would be closed down quickly if it were found the meat had been adulterated like that.
Sure, there was the flap over "pink slime"... but that was still beef, though it was washed in ammonia. I don't think it was the meat people were bitching about so much as the ammonia.
It should be noted that only one company produced the ammonia-soaked "pink slime", and they don't do it anymore. Other companies process trimmings, too, but they already used other methods to keep the meat bacteria-free.)
It's like Taco Bell, implying that you're actually getting 100% beef, while instead they say "We start with 100% beef". Of course in the end you only end up with 36% meat, but that's not something they advertise very loudly.
I only eat chickenburgers, you insensitive clod.
Interesting how the Brits feel funny eating Horsemeat. Sister-in-law in Vancouver, Canada has served Steak & Kidney pie to local Canucks, who aren't too keen on the ingredients once they hear what they are (well, one of them).
... "sweetbreads" ... Prairie oysters ... etc etc
Maybe we need a slashdot poll on "What sorts of meat are deemed inappropriate to eat in your country?"
Pork
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Nuff' said
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Here is a video of a TV show Heston Blumenthal did in the UK, which demonstrated how you can make a burger using only chunks of sirloin and salt as the binding agent.
Looks pretty good to me!
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
You buy your burgers premade! I eat burgers frequently, but I make them myself. it would never occur to me to purchase them premade. Just grind the meat, take a bunch of the result, mix it up with some garlic and onions, and a few other species, then pack it gently with your hands, and that's it!
it's the grease in the meat that keep it together. You don't need anything else.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
"The presence of horsemeat in value beefburgers has caused a furore. But what is usually in the patties? It has been a sobering week for fans of the beefburger. Tesco have used full-page adverts in national newspapers to apologise for selling burgers in the UK that were found to contain 29% horsemeat. Traces of horse DNA were also detected by the Food Standards Agency of Ireland in products sold by Iceland, Lidl, Aldi and Dunnes. But a beefburger rarely contains 100% beef."
"An eight-pack of Tesco Everyday Value Beefburgers, one of the products cited as potentially containing horse flesh, contains 63% beef, 10% onion and unlisted percentages of wheat flour, water, beef fat, soya protein isolate, salt, onion powder, yeast, sugar, barley malt extract, garlic powder, white pepper extract, celery extract and onion extract. Asda's Smartprice Economy Beefburgers -not among those identified by the Irish testers as containing horse or pig DNA -contain 59% beef along with other ingredients such as rusk, water, stabilisers (diphosphates and triphosphates) and beef fat."
So the English and the Irish have been unknowingly been eating 'Flicka'?! Ew-w-w!!
"Both products cost just £1 a box, as do similar frozen burgers sold by Iceland. The Oakhurst 100% Beef Quarter Pounders, sold by Aldi and implicated in the scandal, cost £1.39 for a box of eight."
That is pretty cheap for eight pattys though. How can an American get these in the U.S.?
Generally speaking, a beef patty that's 100% beef has to be stuck together with fat. In other words it's unhealthy AND pretty tasteless.
Of course. Because, you know, a beef patty that has no fat is the apex of tastiness. Oh, wait...
They never tell us how much dog is in our hot dogs either :(
you do realize, the best tasting steaks/burgers derive a lot of their flavor... from fat...
What the hell is this doing on Slashdot?
And why is everyone discussing beef in the comments like it's competely normal for a tech website for nerds to post this stuff...
You might be close.
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
OK. It tastes good. Not all that good for you, just sugar and indigestibles, no nutritive content at all from what I can tell. But pleasurable to ingest. OK, at least I know what it is and make my decisions accordingly.
( incidentally, their coffee is made with some topping which is completely indigestible to me. I found out during a bout of flu. It all came out, processed, but untouched. Lots of it. I think it was sweetened and foamed Olestra.
Same with the horse meat. I will consider it no big deal if it is accurately represented on its bill of contents. It can be ground up worms for what I care. If it is biologically compatible with me and it tastes good, I'll go for it.
Personally, I am far more concerned with pesticide and other biocide remnants in my food. I am far more concerned with genetically modified stuff than things that have been in the food chain since life began. I do not know how well I or others may metabolize sheep designed to put spider silk proteins in their milk or corn designed to make its own pesticide. I guess time will tell.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
posting a picture of some blokes dong going around and around while another blokes meat is shoved up his arse is not a very senstive thing to post to other slashdot readers........UNCOol
"I make burgers out of 100% beef and they are not steak."
Noses, udders and testicles like all of them then?
Have you never met an FFA member or gone to a 4H event?
And we eat pigs (typically the pets even). And rabbits. And fish.
As to eating cats and dogs, I'm not against it personally.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Er...I think you missed the point there. Parent didn't say anything about have 100% beef and no fat. No beef patty should be 100% beef. If you want that why not have a nice steak instead? Or some beef tartare (though that's generally served with seasonings for the same blandness reason)?
A good patty will contain lean beef alongside many other ingredients, such as eggs, herbs, breadcrumbs, onions, etc. Beef naturally contains some fat, but a patty that's "100% beef" has to have had extra fat added in to keep it from falling apart. It's not nice and it tastes rubbish.
oh man, that takes me back.
I miss klerck.
I'm going to tesco for some meatballs.... I heard they're the dogs bollocks
Bullshit. Come to Argentina, and even the cheapest* beef burgers are really 100% beef (and lots of industrial junk of course, but no other meats)
*: about GBP 0.50 each
It is disturbing that products labeled 100% beef are not.
Heard about this story on my NPR station:
http://www.netnebraska.org/article/news/drugged-horsemeat-us-showing-europe
American horses not intended for the food supply end up there after being bought and sold many times.
In essence, what you don't know about the food you eat can hurt you.
Not as seldom as it could be: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/drugged-american-horsemeat-sold-europe
Meat is meat, life is life (oblig. Laibach lyric). Whether it's a horse, cow, squirrel, dog, favourite vegetable or your next door neighbour - if you enjoy it, eat it - if you don't, then don't. Simples!
So, how much is the McGiddyup going for?
It wasn't a scandal. It was all beef. However, fat rich white women get all emotional because it was "icky" and now we throw away part of the animal intsead, because that's more "ethical"
"The way to treat a steak is to pocket it and fill it with blue stilton, not slobber it with mayo and red sauce."
I don't disagree about the mayo and red sauce. But blue stilton? Yuck.
Farmer: "Hey, Marge! Come look at this cheese. It's been sitting in the cow barn all winter. It's got blue-green sh*t growing all over it. Should we eat it?"
Marge: "No".
Let's not dance around the issue here: If manufacturers are putting horse meat into beef burgers, what's to stop them from using meat from "downer" cows, offal, brains, marrow, spinal tissue, etc?
Britain narrowly dodged a lethal bullet in the previous BSE scare (and it might still not, if it turns out that the long incubation time for vCJD means that untold millions are still harboring the deadly prions), and now we're back to a similar situation?
Monstrous! These people should receive life in prison, at the least!
There are fewer horses than cows, they should package up the horse meat as a delicacy and charge 10x.
Indeed, part of the reason McDonald's patties taste so horrible is, ironically, that they're too healthy. Years of campaigning by public health groups has led to McDonald's using a ridiculously low fat and sodium content in their burgers, which results in them tasting bland and rubbery.
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."
I'm so glad there's a Pirate Party running this election...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is a certain horse culture that are very opposed to seeing any horse slaughtered, even for food.
The horse racing industry produces lots of horses, and when they are not good for racing, they sell them. Many race horse owners want the horses to go to good homes, but there are not enough homes to go around. The price of beef might be ~$1500 for a steer. Most steers are raised on a factory farm, and horses are not, so I bet most of the horses sold to slaughterhouses are sold at a loss.
...aren't bad, but I prefer My Lidl Pony
Thank you, fans.
Stick Men
World cattle population: 1.3 billion
World pig population: 0.9 billion
World chicken population: 16.8
World horse population: 0.06 billion
If every burger were to be 1/3 horse, the latter number would need to go up a lot. So the burgers in question were 1/3 rare luxury ingredient!
Do minced lips and assholes qualify as beef?
Beef sticks to beef. You don't have to add things to it, you can buy a steak, put it through a grinder, take out the result and make a patty from it. It may be crumbly, but it will stick together sufficiently for a home burger (I don't care if it would get sent back in a restaurant).
Learn to love Alaska
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
My understanding is that McDonald's shakes are mostly potato starch. I think this is because it's more stable than half-melted ice cream; you can make the shakes quickly and they will have the consistency customers expect. Real ice cream shakes run the risk of liquefying prematurely. The part about them "not containing enough milk" is probably urban legend, though.
Breakfast served all day!
So nothing in there but beef? How does it all stick together?
Is this supposed to be a joke? Because I don't get it. Who has not made a burger with ground beef?
They make their choices based upon the cost of the ingredients and what they're customers demand.
Period.
McDonalds does not change the formula of their food because of anything the "public health groups" have done (unless by "public health groups" you mean "doctors"). If anything, the customer demand for lower fat and salt comes from the fact that there are such high levels of obesity and hypertension, and peoples' doctors tell them to avoid fat and salt.
But if it makes you feel better to think that Michelle Obama made your Big Mac taste bad, I won't try to spoil your fantasy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Various people have commented that this isn't about the fact it was horse, that it's all about deception or poor food quality.
Actually it's about food safety, traceability, and the long shadow of BSE.
After the BSE scandal, the UK and EU introduced some of the strictest standards and processes for the tracking and tracing of meat in the world. These recent cases have demonstrated that these processes do not appear to be working.
The scandal here is not that supermarkets were selling burgers with horsemeat in, it was that they *didn't know* they were selling horsemeat. In theory they should be able to trace every gram of meat in their burgers.
Somehow meat of unknown origin was getting into the food chain.
If we can't prevent horsemeat getting in then we can't prevent infected beef from getting in.
That's the real scandal, that the world's toughest food traceability system appears not to work properly.
Paul Leader
Oh you are so missing out.
Really, why would there be a restriction to *any* country by the uploader of a video? I just can't grasp the perverted concept of 'share' that demonstrates.
Miles O'Beef
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The best part of the article is this quote from [Guardian correspondent] Felicity Lawrence:
"You get what you pay for," wrote Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian.
"The only surprise about the latest adulteration scandal, in which beefburgers at rock bottom prices turn out to contain horsemeat and traces of pig, is perhaps that they contain meat at all."
It's just so obvious! The low price should have been a clear tipoff to consumers that the beef advertized as beef wasn't what it seemed.
I can't wait to hear Felicity's special in-depth report on generic drugs.
"Oh you are so missing out."
No, I am not.
I've tried that as well as other "blue" cheese variants, and I just don't like them.
To me, they taste like... well... mold.
Pepper
Salt
Some sort of binder - commonly egg
The new apprentices finger
A below threshold number of rat droppings, guano and cockroach parts
Other bits and pieces
Yay me!
Shocking. Hayek strikes again, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
:)
I would have modded you up but I don't currently have any mod points. I decided to post a smug comment that you probably don't agree with instead.
First off I have never [knowingly] eaten horse meat.
I do not have a problem with it though. If someone wants to sell me a horse steak or burger (or a burger containing horse) I would try it.
However the real issue here is the fact that there was nowt in the product description saying there was horse in it that is where the real scandal is. If I buy a burger at the supermarket I expect to be able to read the ingredients and make an informed decision about weather I want to eat it or not. When considered like this the fact that there was pork in the burgers is as bad as the horse.
There is an issue with eating horse though, the problem lies with the fact that horse is very difficult to trace as most of it comes from the USA where the animals primary function is either racing or a pet, these animals are usually sent north to Canada or south to Mexico and tractability is often lost. OK I have absolutely no problem with eating pets, my grandfather gave me a rabbit to look after which was the prepared and served to me as a pie (I think this was meant to be a life lesson about livestock), I never had a problem with this. The problem is these animals are given (large amounts of) drugs that are really bad for humans, the classic case is Bute which is an anti-inflammatory for horses. Bute is a carcinogen at not suitable for use in humans nor any live stock that will go into the food of humans.
Having said al that, the suggestion that these burgers have 29% horse meat is as I understand is completely wrong. The findings state that 29% of the DNA is horse. This is probably due to a dried protein (which has a higher density of DNA than meat) that has been made from horse. I believe the protein is used to help stabilise the added water and make it something like a burger. (I only found out about this part today on BBC Radio4's food programme - which I consider a reliable source).
Most Damage is done by people who are AWAKE
you insensitive clod !
Before the spelling pedants arrive:
s/naval/navel/
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
problem solved. it is 100% beefburger.
If you care about man-made chemicals in your food I would avoid meat altogether:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation
Even stuff that was never intended to end up even in trace amounts in the food chain ends up in it. And the higher you position yourself in the food chain, the higher the quantities of nasty chemicals that keep piling up inside your body.
Who put the horse in the hors d'oeuvres
Royston Vasey Burger
...until the nosebleeds of course...
Local Burger for Local People
No questions will be asked.
20 minutes into the future
I actually RTFA.
What TFA talked about is "MEAT", and it doesn't really matter *WHICH* type of meat that ends up in the economy burger, as long as it is "MEAT".
This is totally horrendous.
And I thought the gomen takes good care of the people !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Generally speaking, a beef patty that's 100% beef has to be stuck together with fat. In other words it's unhealthy AND pretty tasteless.
Sure, if you use a definition of "beef" that means "purely muscle matter and absolutely no fat". However, I've never heard such a thing before, but I have commonly heard the term "beef fat", so I don't know where you get that "100% beef" would mean fat-free.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
In the 70s, McDonalds standardized on 17-19% fat in their burger meats. The store I worked at tested it regularly and reported the results. A little black machine you plugged in, filled a cup with thawed meat, turned on, and when the light went out, you removed a vial and noted the level of fat/etc. in the vial. FIll out the report and include it with the weekly paperwork.
And this was a fanchisee, not a McOpCo store. We came within $5000 of a million in sales that year, failing only, we suspect, because a McOpCo (company-owned, not franchised) store opened after Christmas in the same city, the second one in the area. Darn.
At that time, there were not many million dollar stores.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
IIRC even the great heston had to try several experiments to get that to actually work!
Who were these customers who made McDonald's think a milkshake needs to be of such a consistency that you have to use an industrial suction pump to get it through the straw? I want to go back in time and kick them all in the nuts.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
re: found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them
.
:>(
Breyer's which used to make real ice cream, has turned from selling 64 ounces of ice-cream into selling 48-ounces of frozen milk and oil and carageenan which can no longer legally be called ICE-CREAM so they sell it as FROZEN DAIRY DESSERT. My mom tells me they used to run commercials about how they only made ice-cream out of pure pure ingerdients and didn't believe me when I told her that she had NOT bought ice-cream.
I pointed out the ingredients to her, and we went back to the Ralphs in the village and got our money back. We looked at all of the breyer's flavors they had in the freezer at the store and 90% of them now were labeled "Frozen Dessert Product" and NOT labelled as ice-cream. This is serious crap, people, at least for true ice-cream as a religion type people like me. Do Not Encourage these idiots by buying their "Frozen Dessert" products. Only buy real REAL ice-cream.
A modern nation in the West is a VERY complicated machine. Ordinary citizens work, vote and pay taxes, and expect that the complications of a modern society are being well handled by experts controlled by their government.
The quality of drinking water. The quality of the air. The quality of the food in the supermarkets. People have to KNOW that systems are in place and working.
Food safety, at a governmental level, is something that pre-dates the civilization of Ancient Rome by more than a thousand years. Today, unseen and un-thought about by most people, an army of food inspectors, with the best lab tech modern science can provide, are supposed to be constantly testing all the major bulk supplies of foodstuffs that eventually end up inside citizens.
These food inspectors are not looking for things like horse flesh per se. They are expected to regularly examine and identify every element within the bulk meat supplies. This even includes DNA tests to ensure that even if beef IS beef, it comes from acceptable animals. The growth of the EU, with insane numbers of new regulations added every year, is supposed to have made this process significantly MORE rigorous.
And yet... And yet the ENTIRE supply of beef for the supermarket beefburger market (from the cheapest to the most 'upscale') is found to have been contaminated with horse meat for years. This is BEEF we are talking about - beef in the land of MAD COW disease - beef in a land where many still refuse to eat beef because of the whole CJD/BSE thing.
In the EU, beef is inspected to ensure prion containing parts of the cow do not contaminate the meat. At least that is what we thought- now we know that as soon as the EU signed off on beef herds being BSE-free, they dropped the tests, allowing brain matter and the like to once again contaminate Human beef supplies.
In China, a scandal like this would mean the hangman's noose, or the firing squad, for significant numbers of responsible business people, inspectors, politicians and civil servants. In the EU and UK, no-one will even get fired over this.
Laughably, campaigns to coerce people into taking (completely ineffective) flu shots are ran by the self-same people who have deactivated food safety inspections. Trust the government, and take the needle, they say, while allowing criminals to put anything into the food you eat, as if regulation no longer exists. This represents a massive breakdown in our society- a breakdown deliberately manufactured- and a breakdown with no societal pressure to rectify things. Correct science and engineering has been replaced with an army of pro-government shills telling you to shut your yap, and take your medicine.
If the beef is bad, you know it is only the tip of an iceberg. Dairy, grains, water, will all be suffering the same criminal loss of quality control. In the EU, a massive amount of food warehouses have been built over the last decade, explicitly to create artificial shortages, to enable food prices to be manipulated. The direct consequence of this is that 'fresh' fruit in a UK supermarket usually means fruit that is months old at least. Old food, stored longer than necessary, not only runs the extra risk of contamination and deterioration, but creates the need for criminal methods to disguise the age of the product, when it is finally sold. Meat can be stored for years. Likewise dairy and grain.
The people who run the 'stock market' in food don't care about quality, or pleasing the customer. These warehouses turn an essential Human resource into a profoundly cynical game. Someone even tried to corner the entire chocolate market in Britain a few years back using the same method. They literally calculated they could control chocolate as De Beers controls the prices of the SEMI-precious stone diamond.
When food is stored for profit, testing becomes a joke. I mean WHEN do you test? When first entering the warehouse? Sometime during its years of stay? When exiting? We saw the same thing in the US blood business, when the US
"News for nerds, stuff that matters"
If it were 100% beef it would be a steak.
You don't have "topside mince" where you live?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's how you identify a good burger, it crumbles.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The issue is that basically nobody is testing the foodstuffs we eat. I live in Europe, but I have little hope that the food I buy contains exactly what it is supposed to contain. And as more and more in the food industry wake up to the fact that nobody is really watching, the quality of food will decline ever more. That olive oil from Greece? The chance that it's actually extra virgin is ZERO - nobody will bother checking for rancidification (caused by hot pressing the oil, instead of cold pressing as extra virgin requires). And that ground Zeylanicum cinnamon you paid so much for? Yep, that's mostly Cassia mixed in, because Cassia costs 10x less.
There are many more examples, including the methanol poisonings of recent years.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The problem is that this is yet another product that is being cut with substandard reduced cost components. Robusta beans in coffee blends is another. These are symptoms of substitution which is being done to mask price inflation which is a symptom of currency devaluation
Go to a butcher shop and have them grind you up some fresh serloin.
Heat up an iron skillet. Fry up a few rashers of bacon (I like Wright's) until it's nice and crispy. Take the bacon out of the skillet when done.
Dice up some yellow onion and sautee it in the bacon grease. When done, set aside.
Form the ground sirloin into thin patties, throw on a little salt and pepper, and cook them in the bacon/onion grease. It will take some trial and error to figure out how to get a good medium using this technique - on my regular sized burner on medium-high heat it takes 2-3 minutes a side. If you want cheese, put a slice of American on a minute or two before you pull them off. The heat from the skillet will melt the cheese onto the burger. You can put on any kind of cheese you like, but American is designed to be melted onto things, so it works out the best.
When finished, heat up some sesame seed burger buns in the microwave for about twenty seconds. Combine the burger, onion and bacon in the bun. Optionally add mustard - though they are so good I usually don't add anything else.
You're welcome :)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
It makes no sense period. You don't use the same cut of meat you'd use to make a great steak to grind for burgers.
They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
At least that's on the label. It's lumped under "fiber", and you need a fair bit for proper bowel function. Cellulose is essentially starch with a different bond between the sugars which we cannot digest. It's one of the most common compounds in nature (and the main constituent of "fiber", by definition even), and the major structural component in plants. Given, it's not milk, but it's not horrible for you and it is labeled.
Beef heart is all muscle and no fat. Incredible when smoked for a few hours.
100% beef + meat grinder = 100% beef hamburg. What part of that do you not understand?
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
The situation with Ice Cream is similar to Milkshake versus Shake.
Many ice cream-type products no longer contain enough of the right ingredients to be called "ice cream" so new labels like "light ice cream" or "frozen dairy product" now appear on packaging.
This has happened to formerly top tier products like Breyer's which used to contain "Milk, cream, sugar and vanilla" which now contains an array of fillers and modifiers and other ingredients, and is no longer a top-tier brand. As a result, it is no longer legally allowed to call itself ice cream. It's also no longer a full half gallon but some smaller size closer to a quart. But that is a whole other change.
Sig for hire.
Is this some deranged UK version of the American Hamburger?
Just add:
-stale wit
-bizarro-pretentious accents
-29% horse meat
jeez
Blue cheese isn't bad, as long as it's nowhere near mayo. The salad dressing is awful. As they say, leave ranch in the fridge for a decade, it turns into blue cheese.
Putting it into a steak implies overcooking the steak. I kind of like it in a burger (which I'm going to overcook as it's ground).
The way to treat a steak is salt, black pepper, cayane and garlic. Then sear on a hot fire until the center of the meat is the temperature the steer was walking around. That's 'very rare' if you order. If you're cooking you want it well before it changes from 'natural tit' to 'implant tit' in touch.
Steak should speak for itself. Cheese, mushrooms etc has no place except as a side.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ed the horse found....in 200 burgers on peoples plates
Love? Love tore me apart.
Again.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Too bad they tried to sneak it in. I bet there's a marketing ploy that could make horse meat burgers a profitable commodity. Haven't yet myself, but I'd really like to try horsemeat; some have said it's quite tasty. Personally I'd like to know how it compares to venison, a meat I very much enjoy.
It would be nice to have more accessible options for red meat than corn fed (or, for a premium, grass-fed) cow. I understand how fat and marbling affects flavor and texture, but it makes sense to me to train yourself to prefer healthier foods. It seems a fair assumption that horse meat will be a lot leaner than cow meat.
I've been around horses in both the US and the UK, and it just seems like the general population of horses in the states are more inquisitive and self-aware than the horses in the UK. The horses I've seen in the UK seem more or less like cows, they just stand there and react bluntly. I've seen a horse in the US 1. do something it knew was "bad" 2. shy away and trot away slowly, looking guilty when the owner approached 3. got even more pitiful when the owner scolded it. Seems more like a smart terrier dog than a cow. I know they sure calculate their surroundings well...if an overweight person tries to approach a US horse they might get visibly nervous or even flee.
That may explain the difference in attitude between areas. It is hard to feel sorry for an animal that is dense (hence our healthy and unapologetic appetite for cow meat), but a smart animal that you easily develop a relationship with would seem inhumane to use as livestock.
You know, perhaps cow populations in India may be much more intelligent than the average Western cows, and that may be why they are reluctant to eat them. It'd be worth investigating, certainly.
The real path to male liberation
A good patty will contain lean beef alongside many other ingredients, such as eggs, herbs, breadcrumbs, onions, etc. Beef naturally contains some fat, but a patty that's "100% beef" has to have had extra fat added in to keep it from falling apart. It's not nice and it tastes rubbish.
No one said 100% lean beef. If you can't grill a tasty burger that is nothing but ground beef, salt, and pepper, you need to let someone else do the cooking.
If you take a sirloin steak and put it in a meat grinder, you can form what comes out into a patty and it sticks together just fine.
Because the uploader was uploading it on behalf of a TV network.
This was paid for (I presume) by four unskippable ads on the intro, and four unskippable ads in the middle.
Tofu is bland, tasteless and very healthy and low in fat. Basically, food that tastes good to us is bad for us. So if it isn't tofu, it'll kill you somehow.
Sure you do. If you're cutting up a beef sirloin, you're guaranteed to have some bits left over that are perfectly good meat, but for some reason won't make a good saleable steak (too small, too odd shaped, maybe with a piece of gristle running right through the middle). Take those bits, toss them in the grinder, and you've got good hamburger meat.
I disagree. No horse meat isn't good, it's tough. It's like a very poor cut of beef, the same meaty deep notes, but a far grainier texture. It's more like a hard slab of purified beef meat.
I suspect the restaurant was really selling you beef and pretending its horse meat!
Just like zebo (African animal of same family as cow) is sold as beef in the UK. Yet buffalo is sold at a premium and called 'buffalo steaks', and it's also from the same family as cow. There's money to be made in buffalo but not zebo.
But the basic 'yes it's just meat' comment I agree with.
Oblig SImpsons:
Lou: I went to the McDonald's over in Shelbyville the other day.
Chief Wiggum: The Mc-what?
Lou: Yeah, I never heard of it either but they say they have over 2,000 locations in this state alone.
Eddie: Hmm... Must've sprung up over night.
Lou: But you know, it's the little differences.
Chief Wiggum: Example.
Lou: Well, at a McDonald's you can get a Krusty Burger with cheese. But they don't call it a Krusty Burger with cheese.
Chief Wiggum: Get out. What do they call it?
Lou: A "Quarter Pounder" with cheese.
Chief Wiggum: "Quarter Pounder" with cheese? Well, I can see the cheese but? Do they have Krusty's "Partially Gelatinated, Non-Dairy, Gum-Based Beverages"?
Lou: Yeah, they call them "shakes."
Eddie: Huh. "Shakes." You don't know what you're gettin'.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=simpsons%20mcdonalds%20vs%20krusty%20burger&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDAQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DiwuSGvfN0T4&ei=oqH8UP9N6u-YBZaugaAE&usg=AFQjCNHgU4AKzw3tDsXO7O4JCnRCt4SuRA&bvm=bv.41248874,d.dGY
How does it stick? Fat. Beef fat. Muscle tissue and fat all ground together kind of stick together. Extra lean beef ground into ground beef doesn't stick together especially well. For that reason, the butcher actually ADDS BEEF FAT to the mix. It's still 100% beef. Only when he starts adding other ingredients is it no longer 100% beef. Spices, flour, cornmeal, anything that wasn't a natural part of the cow before it was slaughtered causes his ground beef to be less than 100% pure beef.
The leanest ground beef you will ever buy actually has about ten or fifteen percent fat by volume. Really cheap ground beef might have as much as fifty percent. Visit a butcher shop, watch the butcher making the ground beef. Ask him how much fat is in each grade, and ask him why. You may well get more accurate figures than I'm offering - I've only guessed at the ten or fifteen percent. But, I'm pretty sure of the fifty percent in the really cheap stuff.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey, Samzenpus, plus editors!
Ireland is not part of the UK. Unless you lot want to go back to being good little colonists too?
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
"Years of campaigning by public health groups [has caused an increase in public awareness of the dangers of high-fat/high-sodium diets and a new tendency for customers to choose "healthier" alternatives such as Subway, this drop in sales] has led to McDonald's using a ridiculously low fat and sodium content in their burgers"
There is that better?
It is the feet of God you are smelling.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
You might be repeating an urban legend.
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/mcdshake.asp
Actually, huge quantities of soy protein isn't that great for people either due to vegetable estrogen analogues and such. A moderate amount is great for you, shouldn't really be the foundation food source though.
Tofu isn't very low in fat. It derives almost half of it's calories from it.
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/legumes-and-legume-products/4393/2
88 calories per half cup, 44 from fat.
I believe you might be referring to it being low in saturated fat, or trans fat. Which would be true. But there's tons of fat in there.
I do not know how well I or others may metabolize sheep designed to put spider silk proteins in their milk or corn designed to make its own pesticide.
Pretty well actually. While the sheep isn't for eating, the protein inserted into corn is the same thing that has been used in organic farming for decades to no ill effect. We know how the protein works, there have been a plethora of safety studies, and there has never been a single case of someone being hurt by that kind of corn. Also, 'corn designed to make its own pesticides' describes all corn. Even your non-GMO corn will be chock full of natural insecticides like maysin...plants all make insecticides, how else did you think they defend themselves from insect attack? And talking about things that have been in the food chain since life began then mentioning corn is somewhat ironic. Corn, as a New World crop, is a relatively new addition to the diets of people of European, Asian, and African descent, and far from having been around since time began, it was created by humans from teosinte.
These are modern consumers we're talking about here. They've done their best to make sure they are as far away from the source of their food as possible. They may not even cook. They probably get all of their "food" out of shiny plastic bags. Clearly, most have them have never used a meat grinder.
Hunk of cow goes in... burgers come out.
The ground cow has no problem sticking together by itself in the pan or on the plate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The point isn't what do you expect but what it "should" contain. The article at makes makes it seem foolish to expect hamburger to be made of beef and you should feel luck it has any meat at all. The fillers and horsemeat aren't about making a cheaper more afordable product as many suggest it's about maximizing profits. I looked it up and if you ground the whole dressed carcass including the expensive cuts it'd only be around $2 a pound not counting grinding costs. The point being they use the absolute worst cuts and even that is too good so they cut it with pink slime and other fillers and even that isn't enough so they add in horse meat. The label needs to reflect the actual ingredients and proportions. If corporations could get away with it they'd sell us beef flavored sawdust and sell it for the same price meat should sell for.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sometimes reader, no idea where I put my 6 figure username or the password that came with it...
So I'll just get straight to it.
I'm a barista. What on earth do you mean by coffee topping? Are you talking about ice cream toppings used as a coffee flavouring? eg http://www.starbucks.com.au/Caramel-Macchiato.php
"It is the feet of God you are smelling."
Not quite the same thing. Those are flavored with bacteria. The "bloomy" cheeses are mold.
Even so... smell is one thing, taste is quite another.
I'll pass on them both, thanks. Give me a good slice of cheddar, gouda, edam, mozzarella, colby, jack... whatever. As long as it's all cheese, not bacteria or mold.
Human limitations and fallibility have nothing to do with economics in particular. We only see a tiny fraction of our own tiny corner of the world, and have limited means to process that information, so why would it be otherwise? Unintended consequences are a constant result of everything that we do, starting with getting out of bed in the morning. Does that mean we'd be better off not using the limited faculties that we do have? No, in general they help us. Otherwise we would still be bacteria.
What an amazingly small world we live in! Until about four hours ago, I had never heard of Heston Blumenthal. I was researching various ways of cooking pan steaks and stumbled across the same TV episode. And now I run into it again.
A version viewable in the U.S. is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03h5T_tiyx0&list=PLGmqfGN6mMEk21FbdPNr7Azu0Ia6s_vgo
Human limitations and fallibility have nothing to do with economics in particular.
That is correct and is not contradictory to the quote. The point of the quote is that economics can help show leaders how little they really know about the impacts their policies will have.
As for the rest, you have presented a false dichotomy. Hayek didn't say that we shouldn't do anything unless we are 100% sure of all of the consequences of that action. He did say that we don't know nearly enough about economics to justify making grand designs to control the economy. This applies equally to many regulatory schemes. The bulk, but not all, of such things are best left to emergent systems that contain local knowledge that are, currently, inaccessible to central planners.
The hidden hypothesis is that the thicker the shake, the higher the ice cream to milk ratio, hence the better the shake.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Where's the bloody beef?
For a BEEFburger?, I'm going to go with BEEF. If it includes other meats, they should be listed. It doesn't have to be top sirloin, but if you are going to call it a BEEFburger, it should be some kind of beef, otherwise tit is outright lying.
But, but, it allows burgers to be produced at a lower cost!, well, then let the public decide. Do they want to pay more for a beefburger, that ACTUALLY IS MADE FROM BEEF, or do they want to buy a cheaper mystery-meat burger?
Horsemeat has never been popular in the US.... there's just too strong of a cultural memory of the "wild west", cowboys, pioneers, etc and Americans love their horses almost as well as dogs and cats. The small horse slaughter business in the US was finally ended by a law in 2006 which was well-intentioned but had a perverse side-effect: The surplus horses that used to be slaughtered here (with the meat often exported) were instead packed into trucks for a very long unhappy and uncomfortable trip to ...... slaughterhouses in Mexico. Since the new law ultimately spared no horses and removed no horsemeat from the market and actually made life worse for any doomed horses, a new law was recently passed through the Republican House, the Democrat Senate, and signed by president Obama to re-legalize the American horse slaughter industry. In the US, it seems, even the most partisan political hacks can get together to lessen the suffering of some horses.
Most laws are written by people who mean well, but laws, by their very nature, are blunt instruments which all-too-often have negative side-effects that sometimes are actually worse than what they were intended to fix.
Where I live we sell horse meat rigth beside veal and ostrich, and it is actually more expensive than most veal. You won't find it on small stores but on larger ones it will be there.
I'm still wondering how yogurt can still be sold as such in the USA. The only true yogurt I know of in my local grocery store is the store brand itself, which is actually made with milk and sugar. All the name brands are made with food starch and gelatin, and they taste more like waxy pudding than yogurt.
One of the very popular CA-based burger chains (think giant ping-pong ball) was accused of using meat that was from a supplier who mixed-in horse meat ... the public was shocked and the fast food chain took a PR hit (and almost certainly a financial hit from lost sales). There were probably also other factors. The US has had some rather good food standards laws for many decades (Teddy Roosevelt gave that all a kick-start in the US about a century ago) so people generally feel good about the safety of the food supply and that makes an event like this one a real shock to the public; such jolts often lead to legislation.
Keep in mind: many things that are lawful in many other countries (with regard to "tainting" of food) are unlawful in the US. When you say that some "meat product" in the US is only x% beef you leave the impression that it's (100-x)% something gross/dangerous/disgusting; The reality is that the additives are often actually healthier than the meat would have been (often some form of grain). A large amount of the non-beef is grain/veggie based and is acting as a "binder" to hold the ground beef together with a desirable texture, and the rest is usually spices/herbs/preservatives. By law in the US, food ingredients are listed ..... and many Slashdotters may be unaware that the ingredients must be listed in order by % content (1st on list is largest ingredient, last on list is smallest ingredient). Look at the ingredients list of any food you buy in the US and you will see this is true: the ingredients are listed in order by mass, not alphabetical or random, etc
That USDA rating system is completely backwards. It gives the nice-sounding names to greasy meat riddled with fat. It gives the bad-sounding names to the leanest (most healthful and least disgusting) meat.
There is nothing good or desirable about Prime. If you want your meat soft and greasy, you can toss it in a grinder with some butter. Lean meat with a nice chewy texture is much harder to find or fake.
BTW, the best meat is rabbit. It's pretty much 100% fat-free.
of course, if you ground-up a resident of the city of Hamburg, the label would be just fine....
(auf deutsche)
Make the edges thicker than the middle, kind of like a red blood cell. Squish away any cracks that form. Keep it cold before use, then don't try flipping it until it is cooked enough to firm up.
It's not eating any animal-that-eats-any-other-animal that is dangerous .... the specifics really do matter:
The safety problem is: eating an animal that is a cannibal (a situation where the eat-er and the eat-ee are both vulnerable to the same diseases). With mad-cow, for example, cows (naturally herbivores) were being fed processed cow remains ... and in this case it was even more dangerous because the material being thus recycled included nerve tissue and brain tissue (which in a few cases contained the neurological disease often called "mad-cow" disease). Cows not fed the tissues of sick cows do not in fact become sick. Incidentally, human cannibals have often developed health problems because they ate people with diseases and this could be part of basis for the historical taboos against cannibalism (i.e. one tribe noting that neighboring tribes who ate people had lots of odd sicknesses).
Some people prefer the "gamier" flavor of animals that consume other animals, but most average people prefer the more-subtle flavors of the meat of herbivores (which is why beef, lamb, etc tend to be most-popular and things like bison are good substitutes).
All the name brands are made with food starch and gelatin
Isn't Dannon yogurt readily available where you are? They're a huge international company, and one of the most common brands of yogurt around here (Texas). Their plain yogurt is just milk and yogurt culture.
Beef heart is all muscle and no fat. Incredible when smoked for a few hours.
Do you use a bong or just roll it in paper?
It's not that if you cover it in sweet chilli sauce and fry it.
Not that either if you fry it :)
Lean beef (like the grass fed topside mince mentioned above) doesn't stick together as well as very fatty beef (US corn fed feedlot beef from every bit of the cow mixed together?) so tends to fall apart without something to bind it together. There's no point getting insulting just because you were not aware of that.
Personally I don't use lean beef to make patties because of that, I use the two star mince instead of the much leaner five star, but people who care more about fat content go for the lean stuff and need something to stick it together. Even the two star stuff falls apart a bit at times.
"I don't eat meat" seems to sound to some Spanish language speakers as "I don't eat beef", hence the offers of chicken and fish etc. Any native speakers wish to elaborate or tell me I've got it wrong?
I had some veggie friends that went on a ten day cruise along the Pacific coast of Chile on a ship that was BBQ heaven who hit this translation speedbump. I think they were pretty sick of plain peas and carrots by the end of it.
Dude, just when I wanted to comment on the British Seapower and the decline thereof.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Black Angus. So it's mostly scotsmen.
Hey, cellulose is technically a sugar - indigestible and good for fiber!
Even so, I'd prefer a real milkshake. :P
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
"Both products cost just £1 a box, as do similar frozen burgers sold by Iceland. The Oakhurst 100% Beef Quarter Pounders, sold by Aldi and implicated in the scandal, cost £1.39 for a box of eight."
What do you expect for that price? You can't buy cheap and expect quality?
Buying meat at those prices is just an open invitation to getting conned, one way or the other. Shame on the buyers!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
wow - looking at the "food breakdown" poster at MacD shows that eating 1.5 burger gives you a day's worth of sodium... I'd hate to know how much was in it in the past.
Old Joke: Whats the difference between a regular burger and a veggie-burger at MacD? not much...
I told the guy who served me in a McDonalds in Japan, "This burger tastes rubbery" and he just replied "Thank you velly much"
No left turn unstoned.
Nowhere does it say it is 100% beef, it is made from 100% beef. Take 100% beef, add 100% salt and 100% MSG, and 100% other stuff. You now know how marketing works.
I'm not sure what happened to soft serve ice cream that I used to buy as a kid, but I bought one from an ice cream van recently and the thing didn't melt. In the middle of summer, 30 deg it just sat there on the cone in it's original form. It tasted horrible and so carried it around with me, and after 30 minutes it was still there in one piece.
Nowhere does it say it is 100% beef
...except in the summary.
It's still got bacteria in it, just a different kind - it's called a starter culture.
"What do you put on your burger?" -- "A fiver each way at Aintree!"
Why do they use horse meat? to save mon-neigh!
So you got a burger - why the long face?
I opened the fridge to check the burgers -- and they're off ! (said in the voice of a racing commentator)
"These must be Viking burgers" -- "why?" --"because they look like a Norse" ...
What I found amazing is how quickly these spread after the news broke -- I'd heard the first two within 45 minutes of the radio news.
I bought a mincer a couple of months ago after taking notice of what was actually in my 100% beef burgers. Now I just wait until one of the supermarkets have a special deal on steak and I make my own minced beef. It can work out cheaper too. If everyone read what was on the labels of the processed food they bought they'd be shocked at how even simple things can be adulterated by the supermarkets/producers.
1. David Cameron and his merry free-market-philosophising pals announce "Bonfire of the Quangos": UK right-wing government makes big show of closing down "unnecessary bureaucracy" in government to save money and reduce "big government". This includes health inspectors visits to slaughterhouses.
2. Government celebrates cutting jobs, saving tax payers money.
3. People still want cheap beefburgers.
4. Invisible hand of the market decides! You want cheap beefburgers, we can get you cheap beefburgers.
5. Ah. Turns out sacking all the heath inspectors and reducing the number of visits to check up on what's happening in the meat processing industry not such a good idea after all....
What I read, on the BBC site this weekend, was that they said that 29% of the samples were found to have measurable trace amounts of horse DNA in them. Nowhere did I read that the aggregate total of samples were 29% horsemeat.
Is this the typical example of a grossly distorted Slashdot post, or did the BBC get it wrong?
What a coincidence! I'm a Barrister too! But how did you also get to a be an expert on coffee...?
Does beef fat not count as beef all of a sudden?
100% beef != 100% beef muscle tissue.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Who were these customers who made McDonald's think a milkshake needs to be of such a consistency that you have to use an industrial suction pump to get it through the straw? I want to go back in time and kick them all in the nuts.
You wish!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Two words: Soylent Green
Oh chill out and enjoy a Krusty Partially-Gelatinated-Non-Dairy-Gum-Based-Beverage
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
why does it need anything else? use a quality meat with the right amount of fat and it will all form together and the proteins will do the binding. Of course, some sort of seasoning can be put in there as well, but a good beef burger can (should?) be made with nothing but meat. egg and/or breadcrumbs are not necessary and usually end up with a dry burger if you're not careful. e.g. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/cookandchef/txt/s2632115.htm
The 30% is supposedly dried powdered skin ...
Am I the only one who thought the idea of 'dried powdered skin' hilarious? Nearly spit up my drink when I read it. Not that I disbelieve it, it just sounds funny.
Really? I could have sworn "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" had some Ireland in it. Yup, there it is, just above the monosodium glutamate.
Shit thick Tim, so you are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Fecal matter from mechanical processing.
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Beef is full of protein and fats, which provide enough binding to hold ground meat together after a couple minutes. Try it yourself with some chuck and a food processor.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
I worked with a butcher for a number of years after high school, learned a lot of useful stuff from the old bastard (he was and still is one of the most horrible people i've ever met, but that's a different story).
Ground Chuck, used to be, 80/20. 80% meat, 20% fat. This is pretty good, and most people are happy with it. Ground Round is usually closer to 85/15 or 90/10. Again, good stuff.
I dont buy ground meat from grocerie stores anymore. Most of them dont give you a meat/fat ratio, and the few that do horrify me...60/40 i've seen. I've never seen a 50/50 but my lord, why bother at that point? You'd be better off scraping deer off the highway for all the taste and flavor you'll get out of that grimy mess of fat.
"every horse is required (by EU law) to have a record of medications given to it in its entire lifetime."
uh-huh.. We have similar laws in the U.S., but who's keeping track of the meds fed to that horse at the riding stables? Oh, Brownie seems to be a bit sore this morning after the show, let's just give him a few bute (phenylbutazone) or ibuprofen for a few days and see what happens. It's time for teeth floating, let's just give him a 1/4cc of ace (acepromazine, a phenothiazine tranquilizer) to take the edge off, so he doesn't mind having the vet grind off the corners of his molars with a big file. Not to mention periodic worming with all manner of drugs. Or antibiotics given for one reason or another.
I've ridden competitively in the US for 30 or so years now, and the amount of unreported drug use for even backyard horses is pretty large (although not inhumane or improper, for the most part.. it's just casual and unreported, much like the rider popping a few ibuprofen because their back is sore). Likewise, over the years, I've been in riding stables in England, hanging out in the barn office, etc., and I don't recall seeing complete lists of medications administered, or the grooms/stablehands carefully noting which meds were given, when. There might be a "meds list" for all the horses in the barn to remind folks which horses need which drugs when, and there are companies that will even prepackage them in daily containers.
In racing, sure.. they're pathologically concerned about it in both countries. It's a firing offense to be found with a syringe in the stables at a track. But everywhere else?
Compared to most food animals, I suspect horses get a lot less drugs: especially compared to commercial cows, chickens, and pigs. Most of those get stuffed to the eyeballs with antibiotics, etc., because of the huge potential problem in a CAFO.
None of this probably has any serious human health (or equine health) effects downstream, but to think that every horse has a full and complete list of every medication of any kind administered is like believing that any human has the same. Sure, in the 2 months before slaughter, perhaps you'd know.
that "carcass inspection".. a) it's looking for gross abnormalities: giant tumors; and things like gangrene and rotting; b) it has very low effectiveness for health purposes. The official standards (in US, EU, and UK) are for things like "smell" and"visual appearance". The carcass has got to be pretty darn bad if you can smell it. You can't smell E.Coli (although you could smell a bad slaughtering job that would lead to E.Coli contamination, I suppose), you can't smell BSE, Kuru, etc.. That whole inspection thing is a holdover from the 19th century, pre "The Jungle", when disreputable companies would go around finding carcasses lying in the streets and grind them up.
Salutes, to experience. 60/40 was likely close enough to 50/50 to fool me. On the other hand, the wife has brought home some "hamburger meat" that may well have been 50/50. I could see the fat content as I formed it into a patty, it felt nasty. As it cooked, it shriveled like crazy.
She still tries to save money on the shopping, but it's been a long time since she brought home meat that was THAT nasty!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The term Milkshake is regulated, such that you can only put in a limited number of ingredients. It has to consist almost entirely of milk and icecream. Many prepared frozen shake drinks contain non-dairy fats, stabilizers, thickeners, etc so that it can have the desired flavor and texture when put through a shake machine. Actual milkshakes won't have the thick/smooth texture we expect unless they are made recently from icecream which also has retained it's desired texture. This is more difficult than formulating a pre-mix batter which has the flavor and texture of a milkshake when chilled.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Ah, :-)
the imperfect opportunity for me to get on my high horse and wax lyrical about vegetarianism once again
Once again veggies miss out on the scandal.
If you didn't eat meat then maybe the subconcious manages to be more compassionate and, whether you admit it to yourself, more compassionate to people too.
Really should be a study to quote and back it up other than a load of hearsay though
A blog I run for the wealth
Well, you can't say you weren't warned.
I know, right? Is there nothing that right-wing Libertarians and Austrian schoolers don't get 100% right?
Given all the attention recently put on beef, I expect McDonalds to be truthful on their page talking about their meats:
Do you use American meat?
We do. All of our chicken comes from our trusted USDA-inspected suppliers in the U.S., like Tyson Foods and Keystone Foods. Our beef and pork products also come from trusted USDA-inspected suppliers, such as Lopez Foods. In order to keep up with demand, a small percentage of our 100% pure beef is imported from USDA-inspected suppliers in Australia and New Zealand
The term USDA-inspected doesn't carry nearly the same power as it did 20 years ago. From allowing meat grinders to create and monitor their own safety plan with no followup corpwatch.org, to allowing chicken farms to do the same foodsafetynews.com, to criminally lax contamination guidelines on pork mercola.com ... this can continue but there are already dozens of documentaries to make these points.
Big Food will keep telling us our food is safe while pumping us full of the steroid-ridden anemic flesh that so many love.
Not all those girls are teens, nor are they all spoiled.
There are lots of theories as to why girls like horses and ponies (as opposed to say other cuddly pets like bunnies, cats, dogs) One reason is that it gives them a unique sense of empowerment to control a 1000 lb animal. There are relatively few areas where pre-teen and teen girls can exert significant control over something big and potentially dangerous. Where I used to ride, the girls used to ride their horses bareback over to watch an NFL team at summer training camp, and it was interesting to observe that the 300lb lineman was more nervous about being near the horse than the 12 year old 60 pounder sitting on its back.
I'd guess the peak horse crazy years are actually more like 10-14, before the object of attraction walks on two legs rather than four. A lot of those "unused" horses one sees are an remnant of earlier years, and the increasing time demands of high school, but rather than sell the beloved animal, it gets pastured, or loaned out to someone, or retired. They are a pet at that point, not a "working animal" (hence the impassioned letters to the paper to "save the ponies from slaughter").
As a parent.. it's an athletic activity that is socially acceptable, has some element of glamour (at least when showing), and is perceived to be unlikely to bring your daughter in contact with a "bad element". More than one parent has buckled to pay for the lessons and/or horse when the alternative is "ok, I guess I can go hang out at the mall". Much better to fork out the $200/month and have your daughter be a barn rat, get a lot of physical activity, learn how to deal with personalities both human and equine, learn about the fundamental subjective nature of beauty competitions (which is what horse shows are, at least for young riders.. they're not out jumping fences or turning around barrels against the clock).
They still have 10g fat and 500mg sodium, that does not seem ridiculously low in fat or sodium.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Potato starch rumor is debunked here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/01/calamari_made_of_pig_rectum_the_this_american_life_rumor_isn_t_true_but.html
. . . well, next step is North Korean labor-camp prisoner DNA in the burgers. Finally, NK will have a valuable export product.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The word you're looking for is pasture. And the killer cost is vet bills. Also saddles and tack, fencing, a horsefloat, an SUV to tow it and visits from the farrier. Not to mention silly hats, membership in the pony club and tuition fees for your little princess. Then there's electric fences, dietary supplements, fines when your little darlings get out and wander the freeway...
You did guess at the percentage. I come from a family of ranchers where sometimes we have to slaughter an injured bull. The ground beef is so lean that you actually have to add butter when cooking.
The reason for the high fat content in most ground beefs is that the cattle are fed corn feed before they're slaughtered.
The US company was BPI or Beef Products Incorporated. To this day their bought and paid for FDA insiders have prevented any attempt at forcing retailers to label the pink slime content of their ground beef. It was only the story being broken by ABC news that created the customer backlash that forced 99% of major stores to pull it from their shelves. BPI is now spending millions on a bogus social media campaign to promote its junk science that this shit is somehow healthier or safer than regular beef. It has also sued ABC news under an obscure Illinois law (Illinois is one of the top-3 cattle producing states) and also for defamation simply to try to discourage activists from speaking out against this product. Their main point is that 'beef is beef' and 'pink slime is 100% beef, not tendon or bone" I believe this last claim will bite them in the ass. Readers familiar with a little bit of chemistry might appreciate that technically everything is soluble in everything else, the question is simply one of degree. BPI is used to living in FDA-land, where 5% can be rounded off as zero. I have a feeling when independent scientists do tests, they will in fact find that the heating, centrifuging, and ammonia treatment procedures to extract protein from scrap meat yield a measurable amount of tendon content (the hard, gritty bits anyone who's ever tried pink slime or eaten lots of fast-food encounters). It may be less than 5%, but it destroys the 100% non-tendon beef claim pretty handily.
Depends on the cheese. Some of them aren't cultured, they're made with milk and rennet.
Ah yes, a clever joke making light of the fact that I tend a bar whereas you appear before one.
I make drinks and you make representations.
I prepare cocktails and you prepare arguments.
Our jobs are similar.
We probably have to deal with similar numbers of cranky mofos too.
Yes, you do in America. Well, and France.
The travesty with that is that the "pink slime" is real beef. Muscle tissue.
Pink slime is not all muscle tissue. It is a processed mixture of meat trimmings, connective tissue, and cartilage. When you buy "Ground Beef" in the store, it is supposed to be "take a slab of USDA Choice beef, and grind it". It is not "then mix it with 25% pink slime". Pink slime comes from a steer, but it is not USDA Choice. So this was fraud, plain and simple. Especially since the filler was mixed in right there in the store's back room.
Now all the people who processed that beef are out of jobs
Good! Fuckers.
our beef prices are higher
Stuff costs money. Film at 11.
Please, dude, try some real cheese.
Who were these customers who made McDonald's think a milkshake needs to be of such a consistency that you have to use an industrial suction pump to get it through the straw? I want to go back in time and kick them all in the nuts.
HA! That's funny as hell; I have had the same thought (about needing the pump, not about the roshambo) for a long time.
Surely they'd be worrying about ESE?
Ground meat doesnt need anything to stick it together, UNLESS you add other things in there, and even then only if you go past a certain threshold amount.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So the problem with using a specific currency as a relative value is that it doesn't actually convey purchasing power parity.
For that, we turn to...oh.
I'll just leave this here.
Customers don't 'demand' anything from big chains, they eat what they're given. That's why they spend billions on advertising.
INFURIATING: no one tested for Human DNA in hamburguers? A quick search months ago said that McDonalds allows a very small percentage of Human meat in its hamburguers (because of accidents supposedly). BUT, quick numbers for the chain s data outputted it is the equivalent to... FIFTEEN THOUSAND (15,000) people every MONTH ending as Human Beef Meat in Hamburguers. Something to say about it? I sent several emails to gov offices and got no reply. Maybe they were eaten in McDonalds.
My burger is 100% beef since that's what the legislation requires here.