I’m laughing because the foot thing is offensive in so many cultures.
That one was just pure serendipitous luck with the timing cause it’s a moment from the auto-playing video, which by-itself is cringeworthy in its cheesiness.
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What I want to know, and I’d hope this worldly bunch of Boingers could address, is whether there is a difference in the taste of the UK fries compared to the US version.
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This could be answered by shipping a batch of raw fries and the oil from one country to another, and then frying them side to side (with making sure that the oil temperature is the same as in the given country for the given oil sample) and testing while they’re serving-fresh.
Transporting a finished product would not provide any comparable results.
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I used to do some certification work for a plant that supplied McDonalds as well as supermarket frozen chips sprayed with a few different spice mixes. The UK list seems just about right for what was being produced in the Bordman Oregon plant on that McD contract around 1999-2002. I remember there being a hot air stage(maybe a dextrose pre-spray or dip) then an oil spray with a longer hot air blow before a freeze and package stage. I can say absolutely that the chips did NOT contain any beef or milk product as the whole plant was certified kosher both non-meat and non-dairy. The citric acid seems right and anti foam agent may have been present, don’t remember.
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Anti-science from BoingBoing? Say it ain’t so!
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Well, I was thinking more along the lines of, “Yeah, I ate fries at a McDonald’s in London and they tasted off somehow,” or “I’ve eaten fries at McDonald’s all over the world and they taste the same, except for Baconvania, where they are fried in delicious pork fat in accordance with local customs.”
Even such an anecdote has more value than, “Ooh, Play-doh, hide the kids!”
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What about tackling such lists from the other side? “Food-grade materials used in production of common items”?
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I likely find it as gross an insult as you do. I’m just saying that their subsequent non-beef sourced beef flavor isn’t the same thing as their prior use of pure tallow.
Sorry to inform you, but most of out food in America is saturated in a molecule which is a major component of concrete.
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Well technically the isinglass isn’t in the beer. Its added to the top of the fermenter and as it drifts down and settles out it grabs up all the junk floating in the beer. Mostly proteins that cause clouding, but also yeast dregs, fragments of grain, and other fun stuff that can cause spoilage. The beer is decanted from the top, leaving the isinglass and other junk behind. If your doing it right there should only be tiny, trace amounts of the isinglass left in the finished product (if any at all). It gets listed as an ingredient because its used in production, not because its present in the product in any meaningful way.
But I get what you’re saying. If you’re vegan or a vegetarian who takes things similarly far then you definitely don’t want isinglass in your beer, and probably wont like it being used in production regardless of where it ends up. But frankly so long as the producers are clear about their beer being non-vegan then that’s sort of on you. If your going to go the route of avoiding any product with even a scant trace of animal products in it, or animal products used somewhere in its production line, then you sort of have your work cut out for you. Like bone char which is used to refine sugar and, at least in the past, to filter certain hard alcohols. Or animal products used as lube for machines, or glue holding things together, etc, etc, etc.
ANYWAY it being non-vegan is not the same as it being gross, or dangerous, or unnatural, or unhealthy. Its really just gelatin derived from fish bladders. The funny point about Food Bade demonizing it is that its an entirely natural product that’s been commonly used for centuries. Exactly the sort of ingredient she might otherwise laud if she hadn’t been trolling through brewer’s ingredient lists looking for anything she could make sound bad.
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Don’t tell her then that many of “healthy” additives and colorants are made by gene-modded bacteria.
…or, on the second thought, tell her and then watch the circus. 
Re beer, what about bacteria-derived gelatin? Could the critters be gene-modded to make the stuff instead of animals, possibly in a cheaper and more controllable way?
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I dunno. To get gelatin you typically need some thing that contains collagen and then you just cook it at the right temp to break it down, and enzymes are involved somehow. So I guess you’d be able to make bacteria that could either make it directly or contain collagen. Then you just add enzymes and cook. But there’s been persistent rumor of vegan gelatin for a long whole, add the vegitarian thing to kosher, Hindu and other dietary restrictions and there’s definitely a market for it. If there wasn’t a hang up somewhere I think it’d already exist.
But from what I understand there’s a reason isinglass is used instead of regular gelatin (though apparently gelatin can be used in home brew. And there are a lot of other, better, more cost effective filtration methods and fining agents out there (which is why its less commonly used not. So it seems to mostly be tradition. I’ve been told its stickier, purer, more viscous or whatever. But supposedly its easier to remove from the beer and has less of an effect on the final product than regular gelatin. I haven’t used it myself so I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
@timquinn Would that be the deadly industrial solvent Dihydrogen Monoxide? I hear its commonly vented as dangerous waste from nuclear power plants.
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I’ll just leave this here: https://www.facebook.com/FoodHunk
When I was at U, we had a woman lecturer in the plant biology department (who, among other things, owned a Ferrari. The word “feisty” was coined for her.) When official visitors came round and asked “what do you do?” she took pleasure in announcing with a completely straight face “Rape.”
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Plus if the worst comes to the worst it’s a test of damage control readiness.
And don’t forget that during the Falklands a Navy cook took out a Pucara with a machine gun. These guys can cope with a bit more than a rat in the kitchen or a bad egg.
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Please, speak for yourself.
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The right/wrongness of the original source is pretty moot by this stage, the discussion that has happened here is what, to me, Boing Boing is all about. Credit to everyone for contributing to the discussion and taking heresay to a much higher and more scientific level.
I do disagree with the Banana thing though, the ingredients of a banana are banana, what you have listed are the compounds that can (potentially) be extracted from a banana, however, it does still serve to make a point.
=)
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I think most salt in cheap food in the UK is actually rock salt- there are salt mines in Cheshire.
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Howay man, we only just paid off the last one.
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