What's in your fast food? (1 Viewer)

[MickeS]

Micah, as long as I can't taste the shit, I don't care.
/Mike

 

[Max Knight]

I'm totally afraid of store bought ground meat (unless we are talking about a high quality local butcher who I trust). The amount of crap (literally) that gets into pre-packaged ground meat is frightening. Now I grind all my own meat at home. I just buy inexpensive cuts of meat (from a good butcher!) and grind it using my kitchenaid stand-mixer with a grinder attachment. Cheap, easy, and I know that everything is meticulously clean because I clean it myself!

 

[AaronMg]

I never knew there was over 1000 calories in my Footlong Meatball at Subway!

 

[Micah Cohen]

as long as I can't taste the shit, I don't care.

I love you, man, but I'm NEVER EATING DINNER AT YOUR HOUSE.

MC

 

[DennisHP]

Bt the time the meat gets to the butcher, the damage has been done

All the more reason to legally kill your own and butcher it yourself.

 

[Philip Hamm]

"One hamburger and the little fries int he white bag please with a water. Yes, that's all. Yes, I know a Whopper™ Value Meal® costs less but this is all I want.".

 

[Todd Hochard]

Micah,
That's really shitty of you to post that.

 

[DennisHP]

Not a very practical solution.

Works real well for me thanks although I understand some people's aversions.

 

[Luis Esp]

I use to get a pack of 20 timbits and I could finish it in about 10 minutes, sure it tasted great, but my sugar would spike so high that I'd be taking a pee every 15 to 20 minutes, and that's without drinking water.

I use to crave sugar as a kid, now just the smell of it turns me off. And don't even talk about the smell of McDees or Burger King.

If I want junk food, I always go with New York Fries. I'm sure the fat content is ridiculous, but considering the price, it's something I eat every 2 to 4 months when I'm really hungry.

 

[Micah Cohen]

All the more reason to legally kill your own and butcher it yourself.

Are we talking cows here? See, I think that cows are the problem. I personally don't mind killing deer (heck, we're like overrun with deer, and they're nasty animals!), I like venison when it's not gamey, and even believe that the key to the whole dilemma is to bring back the Buffalo -- an animal that HELPS the environment instead of DESTROYING it like non-native cattle. So I'm all for huntin and killin... I'm just stuck in the inner city so I have to rely on other people for that, a consequence of our ever-expanding non-agrarian lifestyles taking us farther and farther afield (so to speak) from the farm.

Your statement makes it sound like you're huntin COWS! Do they put up a fight?

MC

 

[DennisHP]

No legal cow hunting allowed in Oregon I agree with you on the bison factor. I say get rid of the cows and let the bison come back. They were here for thousands of years and fed hundreds of thousands of people without all the steroids, "vitamins" and "cow chow". They eat and get big on sage brush and the like found in areas where cows can't survive.

 

[matthew_rm]

I work at a Dairy Queen. (Im not a looser, just a high school student)
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I can tell you that the food is not only bad for you, but also disgusting. Lets say I have fries sitting out for about 30 minutes. Some one orders fries: I don't want to wait 3 and a half minutes and make them new fries. I just take the old fries and drop them in the grease for about 10 maybe 15 seconds. There, Now they are hot, shiny and crispy. Many like soft fries, lol, but the customer will think they are fresh
---
Chicken is made in the morning, and put into a heater storage door. There is a siren that is SO-POSED to go off in 40 minutes. That means the strips, flits, and nuggets are no good. Well, that Siren is never set up. Once over a year ago did anyone pay attention to that. Fresh is rare
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Im not going to tell you about the burgers...
It's not allways like that. We try.

 

[Micah Cohen]

Back in March (3/31/02 to be exact) there was an article in The New York Times Magazine section called POWER STEER by Michael Pollan. In it, the author relates how he, "wanting to learn how meat industry really works, bought a calf in Poky Feeders, Kansas, and followed [the] progress of his calf, known as No. 534, as he developed into [a] 'fat-marbled monster'; his purpose was to find out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in America these days, from insemination to slaughter..." (from the abstract, which is all I can get from the NYT Magazine website now). Anyhow, this was a really great, interesting article with none of the usual annoying NYT bias in evidence. If you can find this somewhere online, it's a good read.

Ugh. DAIRY QUEEN, we hardly knew ye.

MC

 

[Philip Hamm]

I work at a Dairy Queen. (Im not a looser, just a high school student)
---
I can tell you that the food is not only bad for you, but also disgusting. Lets say I have fries sitting out for about 30 minutes. Some one orders fries: I don't want to wait 3 and a half minutes and make them new fries. I just take the old fries and drop them in the grease for about 10 maybe 15 seconds. There, Now they are hot, shiny and crispy. Many like soft fries, lol, but the customer will think they are fresh
---
Chicken is made in the morning, and put into a heater storage door. There is a siren that is SO-POSED to go off in 40 minutes. That means the strips, flits, and nuggets are no good. Well, that Siren is never set up. Once over a year ago did anyone pay attention to that. Fresh is rare
----
Im not going to tell you about the burgers...
It's not allways like that. We try.

I worked in fast food in high school also (and it's spelled loser with one 'o' by the way). Nothing like that ever went down in our restaurant. We threw out the old food religiously, NEVER 'redumped' fried food. Does your manager know about any of these shennanigans?

 

[Max Knight]

Micah,

If you use a good butcher, you should be buying only organic meat, preferrably pasture fed. That means no animal by-products, not feed lots, no forced feeding, no anti-biotics, no hormones, and often no grain feeding at all. A good butcher will receive whole sides of beef and do the cutting themselves. Do yourself a favor and track down a really good butcher. You will be thankful you did! If you can't find a good butcher locally, there are a lot of small farms which raise organic grass-fed beef and will do mail orders. This is great, because not only are you tasting real beef, not the processed chemical laden slabs that most grocery stores sell, but you are also supporting eco-friendly family agriculture.

Not only can you get grass fed beef, you can get pasture raised pork (the pigs are allowed to root for food on their own, though with pigs suplemental feeding may be necessary), goat, and free range poultry and lamb. The prices are often the same or cheaper than your local mega-mart!

 

[Todd Hochard]

Wait a minute- the whole concept of free-range cattle and pork sounds more environmentally destructive than poop-laden, force-fed cattle, based on the bring-back-the-bison argument.
An interesting paradox, no? Micah and Dennis, your thoughts? I'm not really knowledgeable on the subject, other than the fact that we probably wouldn't have this issue, if more people would eat a NORMAL amount of meat (as opposed to cooking yourself a one pound steak 3x/week for dinner).

Todd

 

[Micah Cohen]

FREE RANGE does sound like it would "be more destructive," but it's really not. Bison for example were much better for the environment than cows, which were originally imported from Europe. Cows "clear cut" or "strip mine" in a sense, Bison historically sort of pick and choose and then move on. Native Americans followed the bison around on a sort of migration for generations and generations, never destroying the land they grazed on. I like the idea of a FREE RANGE animal eating what it alone chooses to eat, not what we feed it.

Because all the great grazing lands have been chewed up and killed by European cattle, and because the market demands fast service, cattle now are kept in pens, force fed unnatural stuff (stuff they were never meant to eat, plus the drugs to counter any ill-effects of that) and pumped full of steriods to get them to the market "in time." The guy in that NYT article talks about how it takes a cow like three years to grow to maturity but today we make cows mature in under 18 months. What kind of mess are making of the cow's genetics to get it to do that? It can't be good on a genetic level, and we eat that right up!

I try to buy FREE RANGE chickens, especially when I shop at FRESH FIELDS, simply because the idea of chickens in the kind of assembly line plants you drive by when you drive down the eastern shore of MD (and read about in the books I noted) makes me sick to my stomach, but sometimes I just have to lump it and buy the "Safeway" rotisseri chicken and be done with it. The price is the same for the most part. I try to cook this stuff till it's dry as dust and all the viruses are seared off, anyway.

You know, I don't want anyone here to get the idea I'm a tree- or cow-hugger. I'm not. In fact, I believe the sooner we destroy all our resourses with our idiocy the sooner we'll be gone from this rock (and with crazy fundamentalists and housing project crowds beating old men and out-on-bail predators killing young children, good riddance to us). Bleak I know. I'm no fun at cocktail parties. So I say eat all the McDonalds you can! Eat all the ground beef you can! I just personally don't understand it. And every time I hear of a "meat recall" I smile to myself and think, "Thank goodness I don't bother with that mess." Then I go wash my hands for the 80th time that day and make sure all my doors have been opened and closed exactly six times while I'm on the south side of the threshold (and I have one eye closed).

Not that I'm crazy or anything. I wish I could be a vegetarian, like I wish I could be a buddist (and not "have to have" CDs and DVDs and home theater equipment and this and that...).

I think FREE RANGE is a good idea. I think reading the labels is a good idea. I think getting more information about stuff we don't really understand (like, how a cow gets to market for instance) is a good thing. I think blind faith, especially when it comes to something you're going to put in your mouth, is a bad thing. And never eat anything bigger than your head.

MC

 

[RobertR]

I think Todd's point was that it may sound nice to eat free-range produced meat on a small scale, but if we tried to support our current meat consumption with such an approach, the results would have quite a huge environmental impact. This is why comparisons with the old Native American lifestyle are apples and oranges. Of COURSE they didn't have a big impact on the environment. There weren't very many of them. 250+ million people could NOT "follow the bison around" on the open plains.

Once again, I see this "we should be ashamed of enjoying resources or even DARING to exist on this planet" attitude. This kind of self hatred amazes me.

 

[Francois Caron]

Out of curiosity. Doesn't free range cattle eat and poop in the same pasture?

 

[Leila Dougan]

Micah: