Ahh. That explains everything. 
By the way⌠any plans to post about molecular cuisine?
I stopped giving money to the McDonalds Corporations family of restaurants â at the time including Boston Market, Chipotle, and Godfathers Pizza â not just because of the meat in the french fries, but then their first corporate response was essentially âscrew you, we never claimed our fries were vegetarianâ.
I wonât even use their bathrooms, because fuck them.
We did a fun special section in MAKE about molecular cuisine! I canât remember which issue off-hand.
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Thereâs more than that on the US list, since McDs themselves admitted they add the beef tallow here.
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I donât know⌠that book is pretty recent in the scheme of things and the McDonaldâs pic is merely a frame from a promo video that you click to watch. Fast food has long been pushing innovative ways to make food look appealing and the âingredient orgyâ technique has been around for a while. This is an obvious precursor in style from the 80âs which is now much more captivating since weâre now able to shoot HD at high frame rate.
Iâd contend that Modernist Cuisine took its stylistic cues from fast food advertising not the other way around.
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This is not the whole story.
My wife cannot eat US fries, because âsaltâ in the US is not the same as in the UK.
In the UK, salt is typically sea salt.
In the US, it is iodine-enriched salt. My wife is sensitive to concentrated iodine (even in vegetables).
Sadly, she loves McFries, but can normally eat only one. She was delighted to discover that she could eat a whole serving of them by herself in the UK without ill effect.
I only count 5 ingredients in the U.S. list. The only thing thatâs not covered by the U.K. list is the Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate. A cursory search turns up that it is a common additive (and appears in foods labeled as âorganicâ).
The U.S. list looks to me to be longer because a different oil is used here (the beef flavoring oil that they brought back a few years ago by popular demand). A half hourâs research (Google Scholar, Lexus Nexus, and PubMed - my goto sites) turns up no articles on ill health effects of super-scary red text dimethylsiloxane. (Excitotoxins, on the other hand, light up PubMed like a Christmas tree.)
The complaints about FoodBabe are seconded - itâs a scaremongering site below BBâs notice. And your wifeâs excellent roasted potatoes? I can guarantee that they would not have tasted so good after 2 hours, much less after being flash-frozen, stored and transported for a few weeks, and re-fried at a store that produces the kinds of quantities that McDonaldâs does.
All in all, this kind of thing feels like hitting down, and based on silly reasoning at that. I donât frequently eat at McDâs, and I suspect neither do you or most of the readers here. But many people do (by need or choice), and itâs not exactly helpful to shame people who might have no better options - or who just choose to use their bodies in a way that they enjoy.
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I donât know what marilove is saying, but when a known liar, scare monger and anti-science scammer happens to tell the truth, you still donât link to them and give them credibility. You look for a link worthy source of good science that gives the same information and you link to them instead.
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I used the same methodology in counting the US ingredients as I did in counting the UK ingredients: only look at the top-level description (i.e., ignore sub-ingredients), and donât count ingredients listed twice. (I used this methodology because it is the only way to get four ingredients in the UK.) The âbeef flavorâ is a sub-ingredient of âvegetable oil,â and while it may contain tallow, that isnât specifically mentioned in the ingredients list (which is yet another reason to suspect these ingredients lists arenât the final word).
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Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh. Now I get the album title.
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Yes, 14 years ago.
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I have to say, though, this really brought together a bunch of people I usually see on opposite sides of issues.
Maybe Foodbabe isnât so bad after all.
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Itâs a convenient excuse to not eat whatâs bad for you, but she could just ask for them with no salt, of course. Theyâd fresh-fry a batch on the spot.
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I have a spray can of food-grade polysiloxane in my kitchen. I bought it to lubricate my kitchen appliances specifically because it was generally regarded as safe.
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Rape seed does sound pretty bad. Thatâs why marketerâs renamed it âCanolaâ in the US.
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4 ingredients:
- Potatoes
- Sunflower oil
- Rapeseed oil
- Dextrose (depending on season)
- âa non-hydrogenated vegetable oilâ
- Salt
Uh. What?
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Liklihood of a chip-pan fire on a British warship: low-to-medium
Liklihood of a mutiny on a British warship with no hot chips: EXTREME!
Itâs all about harm minimisation, you see.
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Wired Magazine often posts short articles about what chemicals are in the products we buy, and why. Sure enough, they wrote about whatâs in McDonaldâs fries.
McDonalds used to use beef fat, but people demanded something healthier, so they went to a vegetable-based oil. sometime around 1990, if memory serves. But the fries didnât quite taste the same, hence the beef flavoring additives.
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Itâs not that the list is bullshit, itâs the conclusions she draws that is bullshit. Itâs her analysis of the list. She is not a scientist and she shows it
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