McDonalds’ use of “natural beef flavor” is NOT vegetarian.
great. now i’m hungry.
Wow - Kroger sells burger both ways, pure and “with natural beef flavors.” When I saw that I recoiled in horror. Why the hell would anybody add “natural beef flavors” to beef? Did it taste like chicken?
Well, if the meat you make is in the form of a frozen puck and cooked in a tray for a day, you may need to spray it with “natural beef flavor”
The problem is that they spray a very thin mist of lard-ish stuff on their fries so that when they go in the fryer it emulates at least some of the taste of being fried in lard. That’s different than “natural beef flavor”.
Doesn’t everything?
An odd hypocrisy:
Food good!
Science good!
Food science bad!
There’s quite a lot of science going into these things.
…and many many more books, most (those not grossly simplified, with most of the molecular goodies castrated away) grossly overpriced, some available on the Net for guerrilla download.
Do you have a link for this? All I can find on it is on their website, where they just say “Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients.” They also state on a different page that nothing on their menu is “certified vegetarian or vegan”, and they do mention the natural beef flavouring on that page, but no mention of actual beef of any type being in the flavouring.
I don’t see anything like that here (bonus, Grant Imahara shilling for McDonald’s!):
Given that most of the meat flavor is mediated by the lipids, and the fat-baaaaad health hysteria led to disproportionate production of lean meats with the fat grossly reduced, no wonder everything tastes like chicken.
Once the Matrix glitched and everything tasted like kale - even chicken! It was horrible!
Why would you cook a calf in its mother’s milk? Why would you barbecue meat?
The Vegetarian Resource Group (science- rather than woo-oriented) figured it out and kept asking McDonald’s for an answer, and for years they got the run-around, but finally the company did admit that they used animal-something in the fries, and later that same year even officially put it in writing:
Are McDonald’s fries made with beef?
From our Guide to Fast Food:
In February 1997, McDonald’s informed us by telephone that the natural flavor (see above) in their French fries is a “beef product.” At that time, they declined to send us this information in writing. In July 1997, McDonald’s sent us a fax stating that “[t]he natural flavor used in French fries is from an animal source.”
Taste/texture, perhaps?
Fried in tallow, weren’t they?
Hrmm. I was hoping for something more recent. Surely McDonald’s has modified their ingredients (and food science has advanced significantly) in the last 18 years? I mean, thanks, obviously. Not trying to shit on your link. 
Switched to vegetable oil back in the 90’s.
They used to use Suet. Not sure about now.
Suet is effing delicious.
