Let's have mechanically separated chicken for dinner tonight.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I like the double Filet-O-Fish.

Should be helpful for Lent (I'm giving up land based animals).

[Dinner]

It just occurred to me that I honestly can't remember the last time I ate at McDonald's. It's probably been more than ten years now. Just Chick-Fil-A for me.

I'll give this to Chick-Fil-A they don't use mechanically separated chicken and as far as I know never have. All of their sandwiches which I've had have been one solid piece of white breast meat so they do seem to be on the upper end of the fast food quality scale.

[Elok]

Yeah, after eating no fast food but them for a couple of years, I lost my taste for the likes of Burger King. Or maybe BK just plummeted in quality in the intervening years, who knows?

[Hauldren Collider]

I love BK. Can't stand McDonalds. Chik-fil-A is good, and awesome for trolling the many useless idiots around here who protest whatever it is currently popular to protest. At the moment it seems to be "boycott Chik-fil-A because the guy who owns it is a Southern Baptist".

[Elok]

Okay, what are they actually protesting? Are they members of American Atheists, or did he side with Susan B. Komen, or what?

[Hauldren Collider]

Okay, what are they actually protesting? Are they members of American Atheists, or did he side with Susan B. Komen, or what?

I think he at one point donated money to some anti-gay marriage foundation. (Note: AFAIK, he doesn't hate gay people, he just doesn't like gay marriage.) The point is that these people aren't protesting because they really fundamentally care about this stuff. They just think that "social conscience" means "agree with whatever vaguely liberal protest movement is in vogue right at this moment".

So I argue in class that fair trade is evil and murders third-world children, etc. Or that local food is just racism against Californians. It's kind of unfair actually, like kicking cripples or stealing candy from a baby.

The latest thing is that Port Authority, the Pittsburgh bus system, is cutting a couple routes that almost no one rides, and those who do ride it are almost all college students. So it should be fun arguing that they should insist that Pittsburgh raise taxes on college students, since a few years ago when they tried to do that, this same group protested furiously. Now the city can't afford buses...

[Dinner]

Okay, what are they actually protesting? Are they members of American Atheists, or did he side with Susan B. Komen, or what?

I believe what has upset some people is that the owner donates a lot of money to conservative causes (including funding anti-gay measures) so people who disagree with those causes try to deter customers from going to Chick-Fil-A because they want to pressure the guy to stop being so overtly political.

[gribbler]

So I argue in class that fair trade is evil and murders third-world children, etc. Or that local food is just racism against Californians. It's kind of unfair actually, like kicking cripples or stealing candy from a baby.

I don't understand the connection between making stupid arguments and taking candy from a baby.

[Dinner]

Why is the local food movement "racist against Californians"? The whole local food movement started in California and there are a lot of small family businesses which survive mainly because of the localovore movement. California is one of the few places where it is actually still possible to eat only locally grown food and actually have a widely varied diet and I see nothing wrong with local people trying to support local businesses.

[Hauldren Collider]

Why is the local food movement "racist against Californians"? The whole local food movement started in California and there are a lot of small family businesses which survive mainly because of the localovore movement. California is one of the few places where it is actually still possible to eat only locally grown food and actually have a widely varied diet and I see nothing wrong with local people trying to support local businesses.

Yes...why do you suppose that is?

Ok, I'll give you a hint: it's also racist against Iowans and other residents of major agricultural states.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I think he at one point donated money to some anti-gay marriage foundation. (Note: AFAIK, he doesn't hate gay people, he just doesn't like gay marriage.) The point is that these people aren't protesting because they really fundamentally care about this stuff.

There are actually plenty of folk who care strongly about marriage equality who have boycotted Chick-Fil-A over it. This is no different that conservative Christians boycotting Starbucks for giving money for Washington State's marriage equality bill. There is nothing wrong with either - they are attempting to hit the offending company in the pocketbook for doing something they disagree with.

[Hauldren Collider]

I don't understand the connection between making stupid arguments and taking candy from a baby.

It's hyperbole, obviously, but this crowd of people can never even find a minimally cogent counterargument.

[Hauldren Collider]

There are actually plenty of folk who care strongly about marriage equality who have boycotted Chick-Fil-A over it. This is no different that conservative Christians boycotting Starbucks for giving money for Washington State's marriage equality bill. There is nothing wrong with either - they are attempting to hit the offending company in the pocketbook for doing something they disagree with.

That's not the point. These people are protesting because they think it's the cool thing to do. Once it's not the most recent random protest movement to materialize, they'll go back to eating there.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Why is the local food movement "racist against Californians"?

A) It isn't - Californians aren't a race
B) Because he lives no where near California. So when people around him are doing local food, he's making a dumb troll referencing that they aren't buying things from Californian farmers.

[Imran Siddiqui]

That's not the point. These people are protesting because they think it's the cool thing to do. Once it's not the most recent random protest movement to materialize, they'll go back to eating there.

I'm glad that you think you know exactly why each and every one of these people's motivations are. You just love to remind others that you are in your late teens, don't you?

[Hauldren Collider]

A) It isn't - Californians aren't a race
B) Because he lives no where near California. So when people around him are doing local food, he's making a dumb troll referencing that they aren't buying things from Californian farmers.

It's also bad for the environment and creates more greenhouse gases.

I'm glad that you think you know exactly why each and every one of these people's motivations are. You just love to remind others that you are in your late teens, don't you?

These people aren't giant mysteries. It's pretty obvious when someone is legitimately invested in this stuff.

[Dinner]

There are actually plenty of folk who care strongly about marriage equality who have boycotted Chick-Fil-A over it. This is no different that conservative Christians boycotting Starbucks for giving money for Washington State's marriage equality bill. There is nothing wrong with either - they are attempting to hit the offending company in the pocketbook for doing something they disagree with.

Yep, both parties are just using their free speech rights here. The owner of Chick-Fil-A is trying to promote his religious view point and customers are boycotting his business because they disagree with what he's doing in public politics. Both sides have every right to do what they're doing and I don't see why HC feels it's unfair.

[Dinner]

A) It isn't - Californians aren't a race
B) Because he lives no where near California. So when people around him are doing local food, he's making a dumb troll referencing that they aren't buying things from Californian farmers.

Gotcha.

[Imran Siddiqui]

It's also bad for the environment and creates more greenhouse gases.

*Gasp* An actual valid argument. You ever think you'd get more people to listen to you when you use that instead?

[Hauldren Collider]

Yep, both parties are just using their free speech rights here. The owner of Chick-Fil-A is trying to promote his religious view point and customers are boycotting his business because they disagree with what he's doing in public politics. Both sides have every right to do what they're doing and I don't see why HC feels it's unfair.

I never said it was unfair.

It's just easy to troll people who think that the epitome of ethics is to blindly follow whatever reddit happens to emphatically agree with this week.

*Gasp* An actual valid argument. You ever think you'd get more people to listen to you when you use that instead?

What makes you think I don't? The "bigoted against californians" one is valid, too. I just find it more entertaining to defend. I get to call liberals racist.

[Imran Siddiqui]

FWIW, it was relatively easy for me to "boycott" Chick-Fil-A. When I look for fast food I look for good & cheap. Chick-Fil-A's chicken sandwiches are tasty, but more expensive than other fast food chicken sandwiches. Maybe that'd be ok, but on top of that, Wendy's Spicy Chicken is far superior in taste to Chick-Fil-A's, so that's easy. Regardless, I likely would have done it anyway, even though small scale boycotts don't necessarily achieve their goals.

[Hauldren Collider]

Boycotts don't work unless the company is made aware of your motivations.

[gribbler]

I never said it was unfair.

It's just easy to troll people who think that the epitome of ethics is to blindly follow whatever reddit happens to emphatically agree with this week.

Trolling people who don't exist is rather difficult IMHO.

[DaShi]

It's hyperbole, obviously, but this crowd of people can never even find a minimally cogent counterargument.

Um...

[The Mad Monk]

http://docakilah.wordpress.com/2011/...-item-this-is/

I did not know about mechanically separated meat until I read this article.
So glad I eat fast food only occasionally.

So, what is your take on the government and school lunches?

The "Pink Slime" in Your Kid's School Lunch
—By Tom Philpott
| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 2:30 AM PST124

Like a horror-film villain, "pink slime"—the cheeky nickname for scraps of slaughtered cow that have been pulverized, defatted, subjected to ammonia steam to kill pathogens, and congealed into a filler for ground beef—takes a pounding but keeps coming back.

Last month, McDonald's announced it would stop using the stuff. But just this week, pink slime got a de facto endorsement from none other than the USDA, which—the online journal The Daily reported—plans to keep buying millions of pounds of it for use in the National School Lunch Program.

These developments are just the latest installments of a long-playing drama. The product first entered my consciousness in the 2008 documentary Food, Inc., when the product's maker, Beef Products International, was proud enough of its now-infamous burger extender to do what no other meat company would: invite filmmaker Robert Kenner into its factory to film its shop floor in action.
.Advertise on MotherJones.com
The scene, video below, features a Beef Products executive talking over a milieu straight out of Chaplin’s Modern Times: a vast network of steaming tubes, with people in protective gear and face masks wandering about fussing with dials. Pale chunks of fat and sinew are whisked up on a conveyor belt into a machine, from which they emerge as a coarse paste before entering more machines. "From the food safety standpoint, we're ahead of everybody," the exec says, touting his firm's ammonia process. "We think we can lessen the incidence of E. coli O157:H7" (a deadly strain). The clip ends with those heavily protected workers carefully shutting the finished product—uniform, flesh-colored blocks—into boxes. Over that image, the exec claims that the product ends up in 70 percent of hamburgers served in the US. "In five years we’ll be in 100 percent," he predicts.


Before the exec's prophesy could be tested, the product received a devastating blow in the form of an investigative report from the New York Times' Michael Moss. This article brought the phrase "pink slime" into public view. The nickname emerged, Moss reports, from an internal 2002 email by a USDA microbiologist, who declared he found the practice of labeling the stuff as ground beef to be "fraudulent." But the real scandal uncovered by Moss was that "Lean Finely Textured Beef"—the USDA's preferred phrase for you-know-what—wasn't performing as advertised.

You see, Beef Products International was marketing the stuff to beef processors, fast-food chains, and school cafeteria directors as a solution to the problem of ground beef riddled with pathogens, many of which have evolved resistance to antibiotics. The idea was that pink slime contained enough ammonia that, when you mixed it with ground beef, it would effectively sterilize the resulting blend. And the USDA and FDA had taken that promise at face value, Moss reports. One "top official" of the USDA's division that oversees the meat supply assured Moss, "It eliminates E. coli to the same degree as if you cooked the product.”

Yet that premise was false. Rather than eliminating pathogens from burger mixes, pink slime was often actually adding pathogens, Moss revealed. Beef Product International's raw material, fatty trimmings that come mainly from the outside of the carcass, tend to be loaded with E. coli and salmonella. The company had been lowering its ammonia dose based on complaints about flavor. Possibly as a result, in tests conducted by the National School Lunch Program between 2005 and 2009, pink slime tested positive for salmonella at a rate four times higher than the conventional burger mix it was supposed to sterilize, Moss revealed.

The USDA had kept purchasing huge amounts of pink slime for schoolchildren despite the positive tests, Moss noted, precisely because it was cheaper than pure ground meat. "School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef," Moss reported.

His report generated outrage in some circles. "Three cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef," a certain blogger for Grist magazine groaned. "Under the severe fiscal austerity that school cafeteria administrators operate under, pinching those three pennies is a rational decision, even if it means subjecting children to ammonia-ridden slime that may contain pathogens." But the company shook off such high-profile derision, and the School Lunch Program and the company's fast-food customers remained loyal buyers.

That is, until Jamie Oliver took up the cause on his Food Revolution show last spring. He endeavored to make pink slime from butcher scraps in front of a live audience, theatrically brandishing a jug of ammonia and pouring a huge dash into a bowl of ground scraps. "Imagine how happy an accountant is, you just turned dog food into what can potentially be your kids' food," Oliver declared.


McDonald's denies any connection to the uproar caused by Oliver's nationally televised show, but the fast-food giant recently joined Taco Bell and Burger King in announcing an end to its use.

And that leads us back to the National School Lunch Program, which, the The Daily reports, plans to buy 7 million pounds of pink slime over the next several months. Last year, The Daily adds, the stuff made up 6.5 percent of the beef purchased by USDA for the school lunch program. A USDA spokesperson speaking to me on background could not confirm the 7 million pounds number but did confirm that 6.5 percent of last year's purchases were LFTB (Lean Finely Textured Beef). He insisted that it's a high-quality, safe product and claimed that it had showed no food-safety problems since the 2009 Times article. Nor, he added, does price play a role in the department's decision to buy it.

The Daily interviewed two former USDA microbiologists who take a different view. One, Gerald Zirnstein, the man who originally dubbed the product "pink slime," said, "I have a two-year-old son…And you better believe I don’t want him eating pink slime when he starts going to school." The other, Carl Custer, added, "We originally called it soylent pink...We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."

Both men say the product was approved as safe by the USDA over their objections.

Meanwhile, the problem pink slime was originally intended to solve, pathogens in meat, continues apace. Wired's Maryn McKenna recently broke down the FDA's annual report on the bacteria it finds on the retail meat it tests each year. "Almost 29 percent of ground-beef samples carried Salmonella strains that were resistant to six [antibiotics]," McKenna reports.

http://www.google.com/search?q=beef+...I7ADFA_enUS423

[The Mad Monk]

Of course you don't have to eat it, you can bring something from home, right?

Right?

Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria “Nuggets”
State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead
By Sara Burrows
Feb. 14th, 2012

RAEFORD — A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

The girl’s mother — who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation — said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

“I don't feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home,” the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County.

The girl’s grandmother, who sometimes helps pack her lunch, told Carolina Journal that she is a petite, picky 4-year-old who eats white whole wheat bread and is not big on vegetables.

“What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly,” the girl’s mother told CJ. “I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn’t really care for vegetables.”

When the girl came home with her lunch untouched, her mother wanted to know what she ate instead. Three chicken nuggets, the girl answered. Everything else on her cafeteria tray went to waste.

“She came home with her whole sandwich I had packed, because she chose to eat the nuggets on the lunch tray, because they put it in front of her,” her mother said. “You’re telling a 4-year-old. ‘oh. you’re lunch isn’t right,’ and she’s thinking there’s something wrong with her food.”

While the mother and grandmother thought the potato chips and lack of vegetable were what disqualified the lunch, a spokeswoman for the Division of Child Development said that should not have been a problem.

“With a turkey sandwich, that covers your protein, your grain, and if it had cheese on it, that’s the dairy,” said Jani Kozlowski, the fiscal and statutory policy manager for the division. “It sounds like the lunch itself would’ve met all of the standard.” The lunch has to include a fruit or vegetable, but not both, she said.

There are no clear restrictions about what additional items — like potato chips — can be included in preschoolers’ lunch boxes.

“If a parent sends their child with a Coke and a Twinkie, the child care provider is going to need to provide a balanced lunch for the child,” Kozlowski said.

Ultimately, the child care provider can’t take the Coke and Twinkie away from the child, but Kozlowski said she “would think the Pre-K provider would talk with the parent about that not being a healthy choice for their child.”

It is unclear whether the school was allowed to charge for the cafeteria lunches they gave to every preschooler in the class that day.

The state regulation reads:

“Sites must provide breakfast and/or snacks and lunch meeting USDA requirements during the regular school day. The partial/full cost of meals may be charged when families do not qualify for free/reduced price meals.

“When children bring their own food for meals and snacks to the center, if the food does not meet the specified nutritional requirements, the center must provide additional food necessary to meet those requirements.”

Still, Kozlowski said, the parents shouldn’t have been charged.

“The school may have interpreted [the rule] to mean they felt like the lunch wasn’t meeting the nutritional requirements and so they wanted the child to have the school lunch and then charged the parent,” she said. “It sounds like maybe a technical assistance need for that school.”

The school principal, Jackie Samuels, said he didn’t “know anything about” parents being charged for the meals that day. “I know they eat in the cafeteria. Whether they pay or not, they eat in the cafeteria.”

Pridgen’s office is looking into the issue.

Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclu...e.html?id=8762

Some Government mandates sound like a good idea, until you realize who will be on the ground, carrying them out...

[Dinner]

We just do not fund school lunch programs as they should be funded. I mean that "pink slime" was even rejected by fastfood companies as being too low in quality and the fastfood companies will use just about anything.

[Oncle Boris]

That's incredible. By all means this lunch was much better than the manure from the cafeteria...

[Wezil]

We just do not fund school lunch programs as they should be funded. I mean that "pink slime" was even rejected by fastfood companies as being too low in quality and the fastfood companies will use just about anything.

There's nothing wrong with it. [/Poly consensus]

[The Mad Monk]

Still, some sensitivity must be had for the minority view.