Take some of those stablizers make a tiny chicken nugget, sous vide it, and serve it with a heat stable pineapple reserve gelatin,and it’s 25 dollars a plate at The French Laundry.
If you want to see additives in action look at the “Modernist Cuisine” cookbook Or Grant Atchaz’ “Alinea” cookbook.
It’s pretty damn good soap too!
Interesting. How do you figure? Doesn’t he, for instance, suggest eating less meat than most westerners do? Meat consumption is a HUGE resource-suck.
That claim is based on the entire world being Kansas. Like in Star Wars where every planet has one - and only one - climate and geography.
Back in reality my grandparents - both sets - were farmers. Where land was suitable for crops, they farmed crops. Where it wasn’t, THAT’s where they raised cattle.
And it would have been insane not to. Crops occasionally get wiped out by badly timed bad weather. Cattle, pigs and chickens allowed them to survive.
Thanks, but I’m not seeing anything in your comment that addresses this:
if everyone ate like Michael Pollan, we’d have a lot more starvation.
Pollan’s recommendations are commonly boiled down (including by him) to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Surely that includes a recommendation that most westerners eat a lot less meat than most of them do. Maybe not grandpa and gramma farmers back in the day, but most.
As for the claim you seem to be disputing – that meat consumption is a HUGE resource-suck – no, it’s not based on the entire world being Kansas. It’s based on the problem that people eat too much meat, and that it looks like they’re going to be eating even more in the future, and that meat consumption has terrible impacts on the environment. For example:
That GMO claim is garbage, and any honest activist would admit that the only genetic engineering we’ve done to chickens so far is selective breeding.
There are NO GMO chickens you can go out and buy.
I’m not going to weigh in on whether consuming aluminum compounds will have any effect - I have no idea, but I do know that there are some mainstream brands of baking powder that don’t contain aluminum
It uses calcium acid phosphate instead of sodium aluminum sulfate
Sure, if you want fertilizer in your food… 
There’s shit in the meat (and not just in American fastfood meat!).
Most spices might have a little extra BAM! of flavor…
Bay leaves: Average of 1 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound after processing
Capsicum: Average of more than 1mg mammalian excreta per pound
Cinnamon bark: Average of 1 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound
Coacoa beans: Average of 10 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound
etc…
Don’t forget all that human hair - gathered from barbershops and hair salons in China - turned into an additive to prolong the shelf-life of most of the bread you buy.
And if you like enjoy vanilla, strawberry or raspberry ice-cream, thank beaver anal glands for the “natural flavoring!”
The Guardian: 10 gross ingredients you didn’t know were in your food
Last week researchers announced the results of their study of just the epilepsy drug carbamazepine, and how it cycles through our crops. The drug is excreted in the urine. But many crops these days are irrigated with reclaimed or recycled water - a purified version of what we flush down the toilet. Which means that the drug ends up in the field and then the urine of the individual who eats the produce from the field, continuing the cycle. And it accumulates.
For all the gross factoids and bad practices associated with meat production, the same exists for non-meat production.
Yes, where growing crops should be preferred over raising livestock. That still leaves a lot of room for livestock.
I can tell you the last time I stepped foot into a McDonalds, January 16th, 2001. Then I read (Eric Schlosser’s piece)[http://www.rense.com/general7/whyy.htm] explaining that there was meat flavoring in the fries, threw up a few times and stopped going.
I didn’t develop my utter hatred for the corporation until their non-apology (“We never claimed the fries were vegetarian”) and half-assed settlement with vegetarian groups. Seriously, fuck every McDonalds executive ever - at least Karma, excuse me, heart disease started taking the lives of their CEOs.
Er yes, but a big part of the HUGE problem of current and growing levels of meat consumption is that so many crops go TO livestock. The animals apparently feeding naturally in that “lot of room” you’re apparently talking about constitute a tiny portion of western meat consumption.
Right, this fearmongering is really less about health than it is classism.
I’m sure that’s part of it, but let’s not pretend that Mickey D’s food is healthy food.
McD’s fries were always fried in beef tallow oil and they switched to vegetable oil and basically ruin the fries.
Saying “fried in vegetable oil” in the context of “not fried in beef tallow oil” is not saying ‘it’s vegetarian’ as their is a coating on the fries that has/had a beef flavoring.
It used to be a small fry serving would satisfy the normal customer–the beef tallow oil was filling and better for you than transfat oil.
The Cysteine from hair thing does not appear to be well supported by evidence. I won’t say it doesn’t happen, but I don’t think the phenomenon is nearly as prevalent as its internet mentions would suggest.
Regarding the castoreum - I just checked alibaba, and that stuff is at least $2 per gram - that’s roughly a hundred times more expensive than buying vanilla beans on the same website. You’re going to have to buy some ridiculously expensive boutique ice cream if you want to taste beaver butt.
Do any of the people here complaining about McD’s even eat at McD’s?
Unlike Whole Foods. McD’s doesn’t pretend their main menu food items are healthy.
It’s amazing that the food police think that “common man” doesn’t know McD’s is junk food and they need to white knight against McD’s to save common man from his choices.
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ETA:
okay, I’ve gotten the snark out of my system and can address this slightly more seriously. I haven’t seen anyone, in either the original post or the comments, who has proposed preventing anyone from buying or selling chicken mcnuggets, or anything else. And, assuming we’re reading the same comments section, I’m actually seeing a pretty vigorous debate about whether a larger ingredients list necessarily correlates with less healthy food. I don’t know where you got the food police white knighting the common man thing - I don’t honestly think it came from this thread
