111–120 of 320 posts
misfolded proteins be very afraid be very afraid be very afraid
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keto a fad diet? It's been around since the 1920s...
For treating epileptics yes, not as a diet recommended for general use. https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps...
Keto (i.e. any diet that triggers ketones) is a compelling option for numerous reasons, not just epileptics. It’s definitely not a good default for the wider population. And it is of course environmentally and economically inefficient. But ketogenisis is a reality of our biochemistry and shouldn’t be dismissed in the same way as other diets.
The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest defamation settlement in the history of the United States. The story took on a life of its own, though. This image[1] became synonymous with "pink slime" (and still appears in a Google image search for the term) even though nobody knows where the image came from. Didn't sto…
> The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest defamation settlement in the history of the United States. I'd say this "beef" is fake meat -- whether some court agrees or not (that depends on who has the best lawyers and deeper pockets, not on who has the best food). I'd be OK with companies being allowed to sell all…
Clearly, when a normal person says "real" or "natural" or "doesn't have chemicals", they mean foods that are (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. This seems reasonable to me!
That's why it's okay to eat beef that someone used a machine to separate, but it's not okay to eat beef treated with ammonia. Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia!
This is reminiscent of the MSG scare. It was never about MSG as an underlying ingredient or racism (everyone loves Chinese food). As Wikipedia says, it's been a component of flavors "as early as 5,500 BCE." What changed is that it was manufactured industrially with "hydrolysis of vegetable proteins with hydrochloric acid to disrupt peptide bonds (1909–1962); direct chemical synthesis with acrylonitrile (1962–1973), and bacterial fermentation (the current method)." Its acceptance and rejection over time follows pretty much precisely how non-endogenous-to-nature the manufacturing process is.
I'm not making a value judgement if non-endogenous-to-nature foods are good or bad. I'm just saying I agree with you, and that it's actually really clear and easy to define scientifically what people mean when they say "natural" versus "fake."
It's just that science pedants are really stubborn. They parrot their "dihydrogen monoxide" and "chemicals" jokes and they don't really get that there's a long history of industrial, non-endogenous-to-nature manufacturing betraying consumers with nasty side effects, pollution and disease. It's really unempathetic to people and it's not good for real scientific goals, like reducing our impact on the environment and improving trust in science.
For those who don't have a personal butcher, you might be interested to know... Many state and county fairs include a livestock show. Often the exhibited animals are auctioned off at the end of the show. The animals are raised and exhibited by youth (4H, FFA, etc). The proceeds go to the (child) owner of the animal. At our county fair, bidding starts at about $3/# on the hoof. They generally weigh between 1100# and 1…
Interesting. Do you know what percentage of the animal is edible meat?
$4/# on the hoof gets you $9.60/# hamburger. And $9.60/# ribeye.
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Is this what it has come to? Accusing of classism the people upset that food labeling regulations are getting slowly dismantled? Please consider that using the whole animal is a different thing to labeling the resulting product however they want.
It's projection. The real class conflict in play here is that the meat that is well-established as safe and healthy for consumption - as far as meat goes - is only affordable for the affluent. Everyone else has to eat meat that is processed so as to obscure its origins and make it more primarily amenable to storage, transportation, and, ultimately, sale. And not primarily, you know, health.
We know that many species of fish contain potentially toxic levels of mercury. The FDA advises pregnant and nursing mothers to avoid those species of fish to minimise the risk of brain damage to their child. Why is there no stigma about eating swordfish or marlin? Why does a plump, juicy, expensive fillet of bigeye tuna seem intuitively more healthy than a Filet O' Fish, when only the former contains hazardous levels of heavy metals?
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No. They spray a mist of ammonia over the meat to disinfect it. It's not an ingredient.
But does the end product contain ammonia? If it does, then it's an ingredient.
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Is this what it has come to? Accusing of classism the people upset that food labeling regulations are getting slowly dismantled? Please consider that using the whole animal is a different thing to labeling the resulting product however they want.
A lot of people decided that LFTB was horrible stuff, based on no real evidence other than the fact that it's cheap. We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef. I'm not convinced that LFTB is sufficiently different to conventional minced beef to warrant specific labelling; we don't expect every ingredient to come with a…
I expect this, but I've been disappointed at how we are doing so far as a society.
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I'm not sure why the EU bans it, but Canada bans it because of the ammonia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime (see some of the references)
Surely it can be sanitized with something else. Radiation or whatever.
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Mechanically separated beef has a specific definition, and this is not that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_separated_meat#...
Then call centrifugal separated beef. It isn’t ground beef.
Why is this supposed to upset me? If we're going to keep eating animals (and that sure is my plan), we shouldn't give ourselves the luxury of getting squicked out over using the whole animal. If you're picky about what's in your ground beef, find a butcher you trust, or grind your own.
In the search for efficiency, the market for X bifurcates into two extremes: the cheapest thing that can be called X, and the boutique specialist X.
If you live in a poor to middling area, the chances are you only have the cheapest X available to you. Never mind about boutique X being more expensive - it's probably in a completely different part of town. If you have a car, you might be able to make a trip to where they have boutique X - but you might not even have time. (I know that's the biggest limitation on me visiting a butcher - it needs to be something really special.)
If the cheapest X that can be called X has its quality bar raised, then industry can focus on meeting that bar efficiently. And if you lower the bar, then everyone who's making something slightly higher quality will start losing business, until everything is shit.
This applies not just to beef, but bread, restaurants, clothes, consumer goods, etc.
The effect is especially pernicious in areas where branding isn't prevalent. It's for reasons like this that AOC/DOP/PDO etc. exist in Europe, for example - otherwise you'd get random cheese factories trying to sell their wax shavings as Parmesan.
IMO it would be fine to sell "pink slime" as a separate category of meat product, just not as ground beef. I grew up poor - at times, we were vegetarian not by choice, but because meat was too expensive. We never fell back to cheap hamburgers of dubious origin and low meat %. That's why this act removes poor people's choice.