This stuff, as I understand it, is nasty! It really pays to know for oneself what is going to into a lot of the bizarreness known as "food' these days. I like my beef meaty, nutritious, and beautiful without any funky bits or toxic weirdness.

Considering how few people seemed to notice it at all, when it entered the realm of human consumption about ten years ago, and that it technically is beef --scraped off bone and mechanically separated from excess fatty trim-off, then disinfected in one of the least-toxic ways imaginable. The texture is basically a meat-smoothie and mixed at a maximum of like 12% per pound of ground chuck. It's seriously one of those things that's in the category of "sounds grosser than it is", and even Jon Stewart's Daily Show bit on it pretty much said as much. I mean, if you think about the fact that "natural-casing sausage" means "ground meat stuffed into a length of intestine", that sounds more unappetising than it is, especially when you consider what the intestines' purpose in the body is. And I say this as some-one raised on organ meats prepared the British way; de-fatted bone-scraping slurry sounds a little more appetising than most offal, if you think about it enough.

Then there's people who eat brain --which mightn't sound too bad at first, until you consider that brain meat is, by ratio, the fattiest region of the mammalian body, and has a texture like a fat-flavoured gelatine with gristle and congealed fat floating inside it that somebody waved a few atoms of a vaguely meat-textured substance over. (My grandfather was possibly the only man in Cornwall who ate beef brain, and continued to do so after moving to London and then to the $tates --I do not wish accidentally tasting brain meat upon anybody.)

The most repugnant thing about BLBT is that it's clearly nothing more than a means to squeeze more money out of the consumer by selling one a lesser product for the same price. At least pulling some old-fashioned cheat, like having the butcher put their thumb on the scale to make it weigh more would be up-front about cheating you.

Its a bit misleading on the industry's part to say that its meat scrapped off the bone since that implies there's no bone or cartilage in the product.

Instead what they do is take a pile of scraps [after all the cuts of meat have been cut off] and throw them in a grinder that breaks it all down into a soft texture [aka slime]. With the exception of the bones that are removed because they're simply too big & strong to be put in this process, the "slime" has all kinds of bone & cartilage in it just so ground down that you can't tell from touching it. There's a video on youtube that shows how the chicken version of pink slime is used to create chicken nuggets. With beef pink slime it's still the same basic concept.

I don't think anyone knows yet what will happen to someone who spends a lifetime trying to disgust so much bone tissue. An analogy I would use would be if I made really small grains of glass that were too fine to be felt, and started putting them in your food. Is that going to wear down the intestinal tissue, cause inflammation, etc?

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the problem with processed foods has a lot to do with the amount of "stuff" it puts in your digestive system that it doesn't normally have to work around. Like the article from a couple months ago that remarked that McDonalds chicken nuggets are less than 50 per-cent chicken and one of their biggest fillers is [of all things] silicone.

Its easy to make the claim, as the FDA does, that there is nothing to worry about. If there were a health toll from trying to consume silicone or ground up bone [and I don't know if there are] it probably wouldn't manifest itself for decades. By which point it would be nearly impossible to try to prove cause & effect.

Researching how "meat" products are made, especially in the fast-food industry, is pretty horrifying. Meat products are injected with huge amounts of water, to bulk it up for sale, and saline solutions, in addiction to the other additives mentioned in the this thread. What most people think of as being the taste, color, and texture of chicken, i.e. from products in restaurants and even the grocery store, is artificial. A pound of cheap hamburger might contain meat from a number of different animals from different regions. Consumers do not get that if you want something cheap, it probably isn't going to be good for you.
Speaking of food in general, even vegetables are not necessarily healthy. The pesticides and preservatives used are toxic to some degree or another. In an article I read some months ago, the owner of a farm said that he plants a separate garden for his own consumption: he would never eat what he sells to the corporation.

Sure, it was decades before it was discovered that putting cocaine in cough drops caused more problems than it helped and it was nearly a century before it was discovered that morphine was more addicting than its mother opium --but it was also a couple of centuries before Britain considered tomatoes fit for human consumption and in the first few decades, the belief that they were poisonous persisted. Pointing out that "we just don't know" simultaneously implies that "we just don't know" a lot of things.

I'm a disabled novelist and singer estranged from a family of mostly low-level manual labourers, so it's not like I have anything invested in this --nor is it like I eat all that much beef, anaemia be damned, and my default grocer was one of the first chains that halted this use after public outcry. If there proves some kind of health ramification to human consumption, my risk is minimal --but if not, why worry over something that we cannot yet predict (if, as you point out, we can at all) and thus may be nothing? Granted, this is also a learned reaction for me --I just can't handle being outraged and generally stressed-out at everything any-more, especially mentally, and considering my family's medical history, I'd rather not risk a heart-attack in my thirties --especially over something so far out of my control (in addition to a lack of Whole Foods in the greater Lansing area, for some reason I can't afford to shop at a "holistic grocer", and I have too many food intolerances to go veg*n, it is therefore out of my control). The facts as they exist suggest "mostly harmless" in addition to definitively stating "sneaky and borderline fraudulent money-sponging of the consumer". I'll shift my annoyance to that which I know exist rather than bend logic to work it around what only may exist.

I just don't know why, but somehow a "meat-smoothie" doesn't sound quite so appetising to me.... Also, 12% is quite a lot.

Maybe "meat products" in the first sentence should be replaced by "processed foods" or some other term denoting those pre-fab sandwiches and meals you can buy. I just read last weekend about a test (in my country) where they tested pre-fab sandwiches. They on avarage contained five (5) different types of preservatives and at least eleven other types of additives. They were also 'fresh' for two weeks (whereas I trow away homemade sandwiches after two days - on the rare occasion that I don't eat what I made - because they'll start walking on their own otherwise).

As someone stated above, it's hard or impossible to know what effects BLBT, preservatives, and all the other things that are added to food these days will have on our bodies in the long run. You might be able to avoid them all, but that will probably take a lot of effort. So, sometimes the feeling creeps upon me that we're all taking place in a big experiment on the (interaction) effects of all these things on us while being pawns in a game of 'maximise my profit' at the same time.

I have read in a number of places that if a food product does not do bad in a day or so, and has more than five ingredients, especially ones you cannot pronounce or have no idea what they are, then the food is probably bad for you. A look at the nutritional information from popular restaurants is truly horrifying.
The down side is that even if you are trying to be relatively healthy in your diet choices, is is very hard to get away from processed junk. Even many vegetarian products are filled with preservatives, sodium, etc. We have become virtual slaves to the industry. Now, to be fair, thought this does not excuse the greed of the food related industries, this is one of the inevitable results of the population explosion of the past century, coupled with large scale urbanization. Vast quantities of food are needed for people in relatively small areas. But where will it end?

That depends on how bad over population gets, how much farmable land will be lost due to climate change, how much agriculture yields will suffer from peak oil, and how much farm land gets destroyed by environmental catastrophes [There's not much being farmed around Fukinawa Japan right now, or Chernobyl for that matter].

One of Rick Perry's biggest supporters was a Texas billionaire who is building a giant toxic waste dump for radioactive waste right smack above the nation's biggest aquaifier. If this radiation were to leak into the aquaifier in sufficient quantities modern agriculture will loose potable irrigation for no less than 8 of the western states our country's foodstuffs largely come from. Maybe they could keep growing corn in these 8 states and use it for ethenonyl instead of food stuffs, but the cost in terms of food availbility & food prices would be astonishing.

As it is the loss of potable water throughout the world is becoming so bad that the IMF has publicly declared that WW3 will be fought over water, and freshwater lakes in Alaska are being drained & sent to places like India now that their water sources have been so irreparably damaged by [un]fair trade. Here in the US swaths of the population are being forced out of their homes because natural gas fracking has polluted their water so badly that it catches on fire There will be major agriculture ramifications if irrigation systems loose access to safe water.

Given enough desperation, I could see this "where would it end?" question going so far as to including public acceptance of Soylent Green. We're supposed to surpass 11 billion people this century, at approximately the same time we run out of crude oil [if modern agriculture depends on anything for its super high yields it is oil!]. This is why I am so opposed to drilling in Alaska: We are going to need that oil when the time comes not so that our drivers can have gas, but so our people can have something to eat every day.

What preservatives do you mean? I mean, there are all sorts of preservatives, some have even been in use for millennia. Salt is a preservative. Pickling in vinegar or a salted-water brine is, too. We know what the effects of *that* is on our bodies --but at one time, we might not have-- and we know that, in moderation, salt is completely safe, even necessary for life and taking in too little salt can be fatal. Alcohol is a preservative. Even fat can be a preservative --true natural peanut butter will acquire a later of oil on top without refrigeration, not only do you stir it back in with every use, but that oil is a fat that keeps peanut butter from spoiling. Dip cheeses in wax, and as long as there are no open spaces exposing the rind or flesh, it'll keep for up to ten years without refrigeration.

And don't get me started on how, without "GMO's" we wouldn't have broccoli or bananas or even maize in their current domesticated and edible forms. Hell, Cavendish bananas in their current, edible form are technically cloning in action --ever notice how they don't have seeds, like most other fruits do? It's not for the reason Kirk Cameron thinks, that's for sure.



Since there's no concrete definition of "food product", I'll assume you mean "any food with a potentially long self-life produced by some-one other than the person eating it", which is pretty vague and tends to include milk and thus all dairy, and even honey. And there have been jars of honey found in ancient Egyptian tombs during the 20thCentury, and the honey is still perfectly edible --does this mean honey is bad for you?

I'll also be sure and let my grandparents know that salt pork was bad for them, as it can keep all through the winter and, at times, was the only protein left in the cellar of my maternal grandfather's family farm in Cornwall during the early 1900's. Also, pickles are obviously "bad for you", by this logic since a well-made pickled cucumber not only has a long shelf-life, but also contains more than just vinegar, water, salt, cuckes, and a single spice. I guess all-natural peanut butter must also be bad, even if it only contains peanuts (and by proxy, peanut oil), salt, and sugar.

Alright, I gotta unsub from this thread and bow out. My longest relationship was with a biologist and I have tendencies to nit-pick these sorts of discussions until I come off like a complete know-it-all donkey (no-one ever "acts like a butt").

FIB, there's no need for you to unsub from this thread because you've made some points about how people preserved food in "the olde days."

I think many people today though, have genuine concerns about otherwise unnatural preservatives manufactured in chemists' laboratories. These concerns increase when news reports link some of these chemicals to life-threatening medical conditions that develop over time.

I thought your point about GMOs in the form of broccoli, bananas, and maize was a good one. I've never really understood the consternation over eating frankenfruit, but I do sympathize with the farmers who have been victimized by some of these big corporations. (We've had numerous discussions about it on this board.)

I think I can safely say that our members here at Goth.net are fairly open-minded and receptive of information, and don't get upset if their viewpoints are challenged. Just so long as discussions remain civil, there's no need for anyone to feel they can't participate.

-- Nephele

Let me clarify. What I am talking about is a product that does not keep naturally, but is made to do so with artificial additives and preservatives. Bread is a great example.

Yes, salt pork is bad for you if not eaten in moderation, at nearly 1,000 calories per cupful. The only thing it really had going for it was that it was preserved. Just because someone had to eat something out of necessity does not mean it was healthy. Indian fry bread is another good example. Loaded with fat, but one of the few items they could make with their resources, much of which was a flour allotment from the government.

From my own experience, I know that many "old time" foods were NOT heathy. This is a myth. They were a good use of resources, but not healthy. For example, in my rural grandparents generation, bacon grease was a common "flavoring" used in everything from collards to cornbread. Butter was used in copious amounts. The only reason there was not more health problems in that generation was because people had less to eat and had to engage in more exercise. When they became more sedentary and more food was available, obesity and heart disease ballooned. That's why many a prosperous rural farmer looks like the pillsbury doughboy. They are still eating their grandparents recipes, but their lifestyles are vastly different.

I know many people from "back home" who had to adopt lowfat, low sodium diets in late middle age after a lifetime of that good ole country cookin' or their doctor told them they were doing to die.

I should have been more clear - I didn't mean the preservatives that are age-old and well known (and have simple names like "salt", "citric acid" or "alcohol"). I meant the preservatives with the long chemical names, which appear to be developed in a laboratory.

Also, I was talking about prefab sandwiches. Maybe that's not the proper English word for them, but I meant those sandwiches with egg-salad and lettuce or tuna and lettuce sandwiches that you can buy at railway stations and where you buy petrol/gas (at least: in my country). Those are very different products, in my opinion, from salted meat, dried fish or tomatoes, or olives stored in oil. That is why I made the comparison to home-made sandwiches in the post you only quote a part from.

I do see the reasons for using the preservatives - even the chemical ones - and other additives. It's not only about the profit, as Sgath pointed out. Yet, it does worry me on some level. And pointing out that trying to preserve food is an age-old practice does not take away that worry.

I am not sure I understand your point on GM food or how it relates to what I said, though.

But, please don't leave the discussion because of something I said.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to as well. This is why I specifically mentioned food products not simply food, and five ingredients, meaning i]artificial[/i] ingredients, which I alluded to with my statement that they were ones that you "cannot pronounce or have no idea what they are". Examples of this are azodicarbonamide and calcium proprionate , used in commercially produced bread to keep it "fresh". Conversely, "Salt" is pretty easy to pronounce and I think most people know what it is.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt with regards to *this forum in particular*, but in my experiences, there are plenty of people very emotionally invested somehow in the various food conspiracies they believe in (I have a friend, off-line friend, even, who genuinely believes that hydrogenated corn syrup is part of a government plot to of mind control to basically keep the poor complacent), and challenging those beliefs often proves less productive than using one's forehead in place of a hammer to put up a picture hook. And sure, maybe half the time I've ended up in similar such threads, I was the one who went off the handle first, but after learning how to reel myself in, I found myself still getting in those arguments, then coming back to read them at a time I can be more objective, or maybe pass them along to a friend who can be, and I think I can safely say that it's not always my fault I find myself in flame-wars about this topic.

Either way, if I keep participating in this thread, I'm *really* reeling myself back, cos experience can be a real bulldog like that.



You'd have to be a bit more specific. For starters, there are several kinds of salts and alcohols, and sometimes labels will just give complex names (often the Latin-based scientific names) for ingredients just to avoid translation errors. Furthermore, a *lot* of chemical compounds are derived from natural sources. Limonene, a naturally-occurring substance in oranges, orange peel, and orange oil is a skin irritant and, in high-enough doses, can lead to cancer in lab rats --but later studies suggest it might be useful as an anti-cancer agent in humans.



Personally, I think there is a lot of bad information all over the map in discussions like this, simply because, to put it in the most streamlined fashion, there are two major stones of this argument (and yes, each stone has many sides and facets), and both have an agenda: There are major, big-name food product corporations who assure people that everything is "safe", at least implicitly, and their goal is to get people to buy products and gain power through money. Then there's clearly a sort of anti-government camp spearheaded by people who write a lot of books and pamphlets, almost always making vague claims that are only occasionally specific, sometimes even cherry-picking data that fits a pre-conceived notion of theirs, and their goal is to basically sell books and gain power through influence.

I'm not saying that newer preservatives are all that good for one, either, but to be frank, I need to know what they are before I can look up whether it's a potentially harmless or harmful thing.



I brought that up simply because, in my experience, at least 95% of all Internet threads about "food science" will bring them up, and I figured I'd just cut to the chase, I guess.

And I wouldn't leave the thread over anything you'd said --it would be about just how I never like the direction these sorts of conversations tend to go in. I can count on one hand the number of times one of these discussions, on-line or off, has ever ended politely, and I'd still have a finger free to pick my nose and a thumb to stick up my derrière later --and that's after what's likely *hundreds* of such conversations.



Find me any-one who's eaten that much salt pork, and I'll find you a family that probably didn't understand the concept of rationing. And people still eat it --I tend to cut off a .5"x1"x3" cube (roughly thumb-sized is what Grandmary's recipe called for) to flavour a 6-quart crock of split-pea soup.




You haven't *exactly* argued that such a diet is unhealthy --you've just argued that it's unhealthy for a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, you've argued that it's actually rather healthy for a lifestyle of manual labour, where a lot of energy is burned, nearly non-stop, over a long day. The human body wants to burn fat stores, first, and if those aren't large enough in the body, then the body will look for fat intake to burn. A high-fat and high-protein diet is actually one of the best things for that lifestyle because it gives a lot of the easiest-to-burn fuel so that the body doesn't have to burn off its own muscle and necessary minimum of fat stores. Your brain is actually about 10% fatty tissue, and the brain needs some amount of fat intake to function properly. Sure, any fat will do, but without a minimum of fat intake, cognitive function will eventually diminish.


A-ha, specifics.

Azodicarbonamide, a synthetic compound, has been linked in the UK to respiratory problems and as a possible cause of asthma in some people. Calcium propionate is a naturally-derived calcium salt taken from propanoic acid, which is produced by Propionibacteria, a common bacteria that's even found on human skin; at most, the concentrated salts of calcium propionate have been linked to reversible side-effects in rats, including hyperactivity, and possibly a rodentia equivalent of autism-like symptoms. To be fair, that's certainly more concrete than than the MMR vaccine "controversies" ever were, but at the time (at least as best as I can tell, cos I'm not feeling arsed to go look up any potential news on this) it seems like it's still in the testing phases to see if there are any conclusive data.

Let me break this debate down to the simplest level. The point myself and others are making is that:

Heavily processed foods contain too many chemicals/preservatives and are unhealthy.

This is fully discussed in reams of books and journals.

I fail to see how anyone could possibly think this is untrue.