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."

Comments

Re:Well no

[anubi]

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.