McDonald's China debuts a cement-gray bun

Have you seen some of the stuff they eat in Asia?

I would rather have McDonald’s than Balut.

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“So. . . how’s it taste?”

(chews, swallows)

" . . . uhhh. . . shiny."

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True though.

Certainly not ground beef or pork.

This has made me want to eat Dutch McDonald’s.

At the North Korean Mickey D’s, the bun doesn’t just look like cement.

This is China, are we entirely sure that the bun doesn’t actually contain a significant percentage of actual cement…?

They’re not exactly famous for not adulterating foodstuffs.

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That just reminded me of a bit in one of my all-time favorite movies:

Ever heard of pink slime? It’s literally cattle slurry. That’s what they make the burger meat out of. Liquefied, ground cattle. It’s not hyperbole.

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Doesn’t bother me any. Cattle slurry is basically what ground beef is anyways, just the “slime” is more finely ground.

As to what comprises said slurry, it’s a lot of the internal organs and other leavings that most other countries in the world eat instead of throwing them away. Americans are just picky eaters is all.

That isn’t to say there isn’t health concerns with fast food (as there is).

Yeah, wasn’t pink slime mechanically separated chicken anyway? How do you expect to serve a billion chicken nuggets and chicken strips profitably when the only as-is boneless part is the breast? It’s just a pullet that’s been pulled apart. No big deal. Turns out the averaged color of a plucked chicken is pink.

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I think they do beef as well. But the photo most often used to gross people out is almost certainly chicken.

There’s actually nothing wrong with that photo; most of the meat we eat is probably repulsive to people at some stage. Unless of course you’re sort of outdoorsy and have gotten your hands dirty yourself a few times.

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I’m just not that squeamish. I read The Jungle, and it really hasn’t changed all that much since Upton Sinclair wrote it, except for the safety aspects (both safer for human food workers, and the handling is more sterile these days). Your hotdog is still mostly pig anus and such, and your burger is mostly the damaged-beyond-salvage hides and bones and organs and stuff.

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  1. Not really. It’s used in very limited amounts these days. McDonalds hasn’t used it for years.
  2. Again, this is a pork sandwich, not a hamburger.
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I cast no judgment in my statement. You may think I did, but I did not. I stated a fact. Pink slime = cattle slurry. It’s a fact. The point being that the words cattle slurry were not hyperbole, the original accusation.

Both terms reflect the reality of food preparation at this restaurant. Both terms are accurate. I would even go so far as to say that pink slime, as a term, is the more pejorative of the two. But pink slime is the more common one in popular use. Cattle slurry, in terms of English usage, is slightly more benign than calling something slime.

It doesn’t bother me either. E. coli and listeria bother me! Liquefying meat doesn’t. I make sausage at home. It’s totally messy, ground up liquefied meat. So what. The product is yummy. When cooked.

Cattle slurry is not hyperbole! It is an accurate depiction. Now you in your mind may think skin, hooves and all… But that’s on you. You people are thinking that. Not me. It’s like calling something ground chicken. You mean they ground it up, feathers, beak and all? If it was done in a standard processing facility, no. They did not grind up the entire thing without cleaning it and defeathering it and cutting off its extremities and removing the meat from the bone.

So hearing cattle slurry and going eww or meh is on the perceiver. It’s not hyperbole. In fact it dials it back a notch from the term “pink slime.”

Oh yes, I’m very aware that “cattle slurry” refers to “pink slime”.

Cory referred to the burgers sold by McDonalds as “cattle slurry”. When stephen_schenck rolled his eyes at that, you pointed out that Cory was referring to their use of “pink slime”. I’m just clarifying that, contrary to Cory’s accusation and your follow-up, McDonalds’ burgers don’t involve any “pink slime”, cattle slurry, or any such thing.

EDIT: I should have said “anymore”. They most certainly used to!

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They don’t use the ammonia treated version any more, true. But they do use vast quantities of liquefied or slurrified beef and chicken. So this gets into hair-splitting. But… the point still holds that the words “cattle slurry” are not hyperbole. It’s the truth.

Edit: have you read Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”? Good book. It talks a lot about all this and has some good facts to back it all up.

I personally am not offended by liquefied meat. I am offended by ammonia in it! And other crap! And bacteria and prions!!! But the fact that my meat was puréed first and shot from a tube… Simply presages what’s about to happen to it again when I put it in my mouth… Oh so yum that image of human digestion and its aftermath.

Neither am I. I’m just a little bothered that McD’s and other chains keep insisting that they no longer use any liquified or slurrified beef or chicken, while people keep insisting they do. It’d just be cool to have the truth and reality out there, one way or another.

Here’s a fun food fact: I used to work with P&G, and got to see how they make Sunny Delight. They buy what’s left over from making orange juice – the leftover rinds and pulp – and spread it on huge mesh screens. They blast those screens with high pressure hoses, and the ‘extract’ that comes out the other side is the “5% real orange juice” that’s in SunnyD.

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I know, right? If you want to stay hungry, DO NOT ask to see how the chef prepares your food!

My extended family had chicken farms in California in the 70’s and 80’s. These were the grossest, nastiest places you would ever visit. Even when I was a kid my tolerance for yuck was pretty high & I still hated visiting those relatives because those farms were so nasty.

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The image in the article looks so badly mocked up that it must be fake but apparently not:

http://sotheresthis.com/food/gray-burger-bun-mcdonalds-china/

The photo in this article shows just how unappealing (and slimy) it actually looks.

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