Can technology close the gap between “picked from the farm” and “served on the plate”, at “McDonalds” scale to be cost effective?
I think you’ve got the scale on the wrong side of the equation.
I love car culture. I hate McDonald’s.
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The first time I had duck fat fries – made by a friend of mine who keeps strictly kosher – my god, they were a revelation!
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“Natural beef flavor” does not necessarily mean “beef,” nor even “animal.” What’s “natural” about it is that it was derived from a “natural source.” In Fast Food Nation, the author talks about the example of “natural banana flavor,” which is extracted, IIRC, from peach pits. The extraction and refining process for this does not remove all of the naturally occurring–I kid you not–cyanide. It turns out that “artificial banana flavor” is chemically identical, but is derived from petroleum, in a very pure (and cyanide-free) form.
Now, I don’t know what “natural beef flavor” is. If the FDA approved it, then it is apparently “generally regarded as safe.” Whether or not it is vegetarian is a separate issue. And now, some sauce: http://www.mcdonalds.com/content/us/en/your_questions/our_food/are-your-fries-vegetarian-friendly.html . They’re fairly open about it, it looks like.
Well in many cases, the people who work at restaurants are better cooks than I am. (Though I don’t eat at McD’s.) I could make lo mein, but it won’t taste nearly as good as take-out lo mein. (Granted, mine probably has 1/4 of the sodium of take-out).
For something relatively simple like a sandwich, I guess it’s a question of supplies. I probably shouldn’t (and generally don’t) eat a sandwich from the deli more than once a week. As it’s usually packaged, the stuff would go past its prime before I’d get around to making a second sandwich (I can’t buy sub rolls one-at-a-time, or two slices of cheese etc.). As for something like a chicken parmesan sandwich (again, not like I should be eating many of these), I don’t think mine would compare with a professional job.
I didn’t know about that, but I’ve heard a similar story about Taco Bell. The old restaurants – brick exterior, Alamo-shaped top, arched window – had a large kitchen and small dining area. This was because they actually cooked everything, and they needed a big kitchen for that. Sometime during the 80s, I guess, they changed the recipes so that all the food (other than, say, produce) arrived dehydrated, and only had to be steamed – no real cooking involved. The new stores had a smaller kitchen and larger dining area and the old stores were phased out.
So I was told.
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There’s basically nothing I like or respect about McDonald’s, in any respect, starting with the fact that I’m one of those horrid vegetarians to whom they eventually had to admit that there were animal products in the fries, years of claims to the contrary notwithstanding. They’re shit on labor, the food is a nutritional nightmare, they’re running 9/11-sploitation ads, and they won’t license my Grimace fanfic. Okay? I pretty much hate McDonald’s, and for what I think are pretty good reasons.
That being said, if these 19 ingredients–plus whatever system of freezing, worldwide shipping, bioengineering, etc. goes along with them–aren’t basically the only way to make french fries available to that many people at that price in perpetuity, I’d be VERY surprised. For all their shittiness and evil, such as you care to construe such things, you can’t do what they do at the scale they do it while having overlooked any substantially simpler, cheaper, or more efficient way of doing things.
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I have recently made a vegetarian very unhappy when I explained how gelatine is made - he was very fond of . Now that I think about it, not only many brands of gummy bears are made from gelatine, but also Marshmallows [evil grin].
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Shorter attention span?
Your tale jibes well with my personal experience.
Full disclosure: I never actually worked at a Taco Bell, but two of my friends from high school were employed there and shared tales of cooking up giant vats of beans and taco meat.
I’ve never understood this weird pleasure some meat-eaters take in being rude to or upsetting vegetarians. Doesn’t there being more vegetarians mean that there’s more beef and bacon left to accumulate in your arteries and gut?
It’s a rare vegetarian who doesn’t know how gelatin is made, but taking you at your word I truly don’t understand your taking pleasure in this.
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More lucrative add market?
More monopolistic cable providers?
Thing is, if you give me long, unbroken segments, I’ll watch.
Splitting it up, putting in lots of advert breaks etc guarantees I’ll mute the TV and start surfing the web, then forget to turn the sound back on when the content starts again.
I watch films all the time, but can’t watch them on TV unless it’s on one of the premium channels.
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and think of how fast fresh fries can be when the potato come shooting out of the tube at 800mph through a fine mesh screen.
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Or the Gluten or intolerant.
Nah, I like the beef fat. Horse fat is so equestrian.
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Its standard reality TV structure these days. A lot of it is painstakingly tested, market researched, and engineered. Some of it is to stretch content to fill more air time. But for the most part is all built around very carefully pacing out information, cliff hangers, endless repetition and “shocking” revelations in order to keep people interested and tuned in during an increased load of advertising. Often times working with content that isn’t inherently all that interesting. Its the same reason a lot of reality shows are obviously staged (or sometimes explicitly scripted). There really isn’t anything there worth paying attention to, so you dice it up, invent events, and make it all flashy. With segments just long enough to get you to the commercials before you get sick of it/bored.
The point of these shows is largely to fill air time. With the expansion of cable you had all these channels that needed to get something on screen at least 18 hours a day, but unlike the big American networks or entities like the BBC they didn’t have decades of back catalog and connections to large Media companies. So you had to make a lot of content, cheap, and fast, and cram as many ads in as possible. Reality is so cheap to produce, that even if its not popular at all it can make money. You just need to sell enough ads to tie it too. Some of it is really popular though, so it just becomes much more profitable than other types of programs.
I don’t really get why they do so much of it on Mythbusters (the Australian version isn’t as bad but they still do a lot of this stuff). The content there doesn’t really need to be stretched, and its often interesting enough to keep people watching without it. But just for pacing reasons there does need to be a certain amount of it. Intercutting the different segments, the occasional cliff hanger, brief recaps so you know which segment your watching after a break. A certain amount of each are necessary to even out the pacing and keep it clear whats going on. Give you a clear “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. Any editor who knows what he’s doing is going to do something basically similar to that. I’d assume anything beyond that would be dictated by the different networks broadcasting it. Each one demanding the show get cut to match their particular market research, and the particular load of ads they need to sell to fit that time slot.
Which sort of factors in to this massive misunderstanding of the show that the TV business seems to have had. If you look at a lot of the shows (at least in the US) that tried to mimic or follow on from Mythbusters they seem to focus on one weird little gimmick. “Hey man we’ve got slow motion cameras!” or “This is the show where we blow things up” or “Hey man I’m gonna build this thing that breaks other things!”. Often times with little purpose behind any of it. None of those shows lasted. I dunno that anyone in the TV business (and especially at Discovery who show it in The US) really every understood what made the show popular. It wasn’t reality TV flash and editing, and it wasn’t things going boom. And the President of The United States didn’t appear on Mythbusters because they done blowed shit up ril good. They do a damn good job of accurate presenting actual science content. That’s what people liked.
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I would really like to know why they need silicone (common name for the polydimethylsiloxane) to make these things, twice. It’s probably a silicone oil. Maybe to make them slide through the slicers? Or are they “enhancing” the potatoes to make them more shapely?
I’ve noticed this too. Not all carnivores are sadists, but it seems many or most sadists are also carnivors. (And in the sam way, not all vegetarians are stuck up self rightious jerks, but a disproportionate number of such people happen to also be vegetarian.)
Maybe what I’m seeing isn’t sadism so much as bigotry.
