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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."
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 make burgers out of 100% beef and they are not steak
Probably safer, too. Ever hear of mad horse disease?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
@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.
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
yes you just have to worry about malnutrition!
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
Plus, all of their horses are 100% horse-fed for that double-horse juiced-in goodness!
#DeleteChrome
Vegans don't have enough meat in them to make a decent burger.
Sawdust. 100% Natural.
At least that what it seems they use in the US.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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 not about the ethics of the animal in question, it's about the promises made by the manufacturer (no mention of horse) and the questions of quality control, correct process and oversight.
My concern isn't "OMG HORSIES!"
My concern is "fuck you consumer" as they pump the product full of whatever they think they can get away with to turn a profit.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
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!
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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?
They never tell us how much dog is in our hot dogs either :(
I would purchase them again today. Horses are not especially more intelligent than cows.
Viewing this though the issue of horsemeat misses the bigger (and more important) question raised. Namely, that if horsemeat was able to end up where it shouldn't have, what other garbage has "accidentally" made its way into these burgers over the years?
Meat rejected for human consumption (destined for pet food and the like or for destruction) making its way back into the human food chain? Quite likely, this has already been heard of. Other animals? God knows what crap?
It's not remotely surprising that burgers costing less than 13p each (inc. VAT (*)) would contain any old rubbish. Doesn't mean it's acceptable for anyone to sell that, regardless of the price, but it shouldn't be surprising.
(*) Sales tax, for the benefit of those outside the UK
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Yes, but you die from exhaustion telling everyone you are a vegan. Bad trade off.
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]
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
Cats and dogs are carnivores and on top of the food chain where the less than healthy stuff gets concentrated. All herbivores are good to eat, unless they're fed odd diets or medicated.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
But to not swing the pendulum all the way, it should be noted that many people would probably get by just fine with a bit of less meat and at the same time gain a healthier lifestyle.
Horses are very rarely pets, only for the very rich. They are usually just living tools. Just because you can care about something doesn't mean you can't eat it. Or are you a vegetarian? Anybody who thinks there's any difference between eating a cow and eating a cat or dog has some serious cognitive dissonance going on.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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
And you don't have to worry about any of this BS.
What if they put HS in your burgers instead of BS?
And if you are vegan yourself and not simply offering it up as a suggestion, have you seriously _never_ been served a dish containing meat when you ordering a vegan dish? It's happened to a few vegetarian friends on numerous occasions... I never really saw what the fuss was though... i mean it's got vegetables in it right? ;)
yes you just have to worry about malnutrition!
You have to worry more about accidentally ingesting dairy and losing the vegan super powers you gained at vegan academy
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.
I would purchase them again today.
Horses are not especially more intelligent than cows.
Horse meat is also very tasty -- I like it better than beef. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to buy where I live. One restaurant offered it, but there was a huge uproar about it and I believe they've now taken it off their menu.
It's really not fair that I should have to change my diet because of a bunch of loud-mouthed activisits. Either meat is legal or it isn't, and -- except for reasons of public health -- I don't see why some species should be considered 'OK' and others not.
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.
Wrong. You don't want to eat the meat from an animal that also eats meat. Remember what happened when they fed ground up cows to cows? It doesn't end well.
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
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.
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!"
So is Felis silvestris catus.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
Cats and dogs are domesticated animals that eat whatever humans feed them. Dogs raised for food (in Korea, for example) have a diet no worse (maybe better) than most cattle. And even the average family dog and house cat eat perfectly safe food that is not "concentrating" poisons.
Not that I am really interested in eating either of them, but let's not make excuses, the reason is purely psychological.
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
that price makes the issue obvious. I a ball of paper the same size would cost more, then whatever you are purchasing isnt food.
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
Very interesting story. But there are ridiculously large numbers of horses in the US that never see a race track, and aren't used for anything more than the entertainment of spoiled teen age suburban girls, who seem to have an unnatural attraction to horses and ponies.
There are horse lovers everywhere, my local newspaper was recently full of letters to the editor deploring the selling of horses to slaughter, wanting to make it against the law, and metaphorically equating the horses with children. The letter writers were all female. Again, there is something vaguely creepy about that.
I've never understood why there are so many horses about. They aren't exactly cheap to keep, you get to ride them less than once a week on average and you end up having to truck them somewhere do to so. Yet I can walk a mile from my house a see a pasture with 5 horses which I've never seen being used for anything. Not eve by the occasional teen age girl. Trotted out for the forth of July parade where everyone dresses like cowboys (mostly cowgirls) in an area that has never had a cowboy tradition.
Still, on a recent trip I spotted one very large Horse feeding yard just east of Shelby Montana where horses were being gathered for shipment to a Canadian packing plant. Apparently not everyone has an aversion to horse meat.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Lets not forget about canis lupus familiaris. I hear those are a delicacy in some parts of the world.
You missed the point entirely. Despite the tap-dancing Breyer's does on their web site, their "frozen dessert" products do not contain enough milk and milk solids and actual DAIRY content to be legally labelled as ice cream. They must, therefore, be labelled as "Frozen Dessert", because what they are selling is no longer legally meeting the definition of ice-cream. See also the canadian dairy farmer's web site about what ice-cream really is. Please note that I specifically said that 90% of what is avaiable at Ralph's from Breyer's is "frozen dairy dessert". Even though they still make ice-cream, they don't really make that much of it anymore. And their tap-dancing question/answers really just say "we cheaped out so the ice-cream would be smoother and tastier and we cherry-picked focus groups until we found a sub-group that was stupid enough to say that the twigs and mud taste as good as the real thing."
;>p
My original point stands: most of what Breyer's makes in NO LONGER LEGALLY CAPABLE OF BEING LABELLED AS ICE-CREAM, because it is not ice-cream. And my post was in response to another post about a store sellling "shakes" instead of "milk shakes" because what they were shakin' in the yard did NOT have enough milk or dairy in it to be legally called "milk shake". See ya in the yard!
Or accidentally ingesting dairy/meat and getting diarrhea because you no longer have the gut bacteria to properly process it. (like that vegan idiot from super-size me who puked from just eating a double-quarter-pounder, and then blamed all his health problem on McDonalds)
That reminds me of the "meat flavored" spaghetti sauce at the store.
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.
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.
It was never thrown away to begin with, dumbass. Before it ended up on our dinner tables, it was primarily used in pet foods. It has nothing to do with being ethical, and everything to do with creating a grossly inferior product using the runoff of the animal we are not accustomed to eating and having to chemical treat it just so it doesn't actually kill us when we do eat it.
There was nothing right about what they were doing, except for their bank accounts, being able to stretch out their original product by that much more while charging us the same price.
Your post just goes to show what we have come to expect in our daily lives, so much that we outright stick up for the status quo of people screwing everyone over for their own personal gain. Who cares what we eat, right, as long as it doesn't outright kill us? Quality isn't even in our dictionary anymore.
"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.
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?
As a Hindu, my burgers have no beef. Only chicken and sometimes bacon. However, horse is not verboten, so if I knew that a 'beef' burger was actually 100% horsemeat, as opposed to 29%, I'd have no problems w/ it.
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.