The case of the not meat...meat
Background:
While chowing down on our usual assortment of non-good-for-you foods
we wondered what was really in the meats of the McDonalds meat.
Someone did sort of have a direct answer as they have heard that
depending on the franchise owner (dependent on section of a specific
town and whatnot) they can use either real beef or a substitute soy
beef. Wondering if this is true we are determined to see if what we
have been eating for the past few years might actually be good for
us in some way...we cannot stand for this outrage.
Edwin Amirsaleh came up with this philosophy as
to what exactly is in McDonalds meat.
First of all, they're not using a soy substitute for beef; they
would have to say that and plus why would they? That soy beef
substitute stuff isn't nearly tasty enough. If you love you soy
curds and gluten, be my guest and order the soy burger which they do
have as an option, but I wouldn't recommend it.
You might be surprised to find out that it is indeed straight-up,
old-fashioned, real beef you're eating. When an ingredient is listed
as "beef" (or "beef patty", as it were - look at the McDonald's
website), the FDA requires it to actually be the muscular part of a
cow, which is beef as we normally know it. Although it's probably a
lower grade of meat than you would buy from the supermarket and cook
yourself.
Generally the "dangerous chemicals" that the "evil companies" use in
food are preservatives and food colorings and certain other things
such as some kinds of dough-softeners. And yes they can be pretty
malevolent at times. See below for more detail on the McDonald's
meat stuff.
You might have heard of companies using all the other parts of
animals (as in the organs and bones) for some food products, but
this has to be listed as "meat by-product" or "poultry by-product"
or "fish by-product" (i.e. the fast-food companies don't use these -
they would quickly get screwed over by public outrage if they did).
One would think that with all the cows they need to make all the
beef for all the McDonald's in America, there would be a lot of this
leftover "meat by-product" and nowhere to put it, but the food
industries actually do a rather good job at making sure they use and
make profit from the whole animal - meat by-product appears in a lot
of pet foods and in some sausage products (such as hot dogs - check
the ingredients labels if it really bothers you, even though it
shouldn't as I explain below), and gelatin is made by putting bone
and/or hooves and/or pigskins through some long chemical processes
to hydrolyzes (split-up) the collagen proteins into smaller
proteins, one of which is gelatin (i.e. gelatin is just a protein -
don't worry about it being some dangerous unnatural chemical). The
whole meat by-product thing may sound kind of disgusting, but the
way I see it, all these parts of an animal are edible anyway - I
mean, you don't complain when you go to a French restaurant and
order a fancy dish involving calf liver or something, and the
companies clean out the stomach and intestines if they ever use
them, and the hooves and skins and stuff used to make gelatin goes
through a really long chemical process of hydroxylation and
isolation, so it's a far cry from disgusting meat parts when it's
done.
You might have heard of them using flavorings in their beef. Of
course food companies WOULD use meat flavorings if it existed, but
the fact of the matter is it really isn't possible to make meat
flavorings, even though they have thousands of fruit flavorings. The
specific flavors of fruits and some other food items come from some
pretty specific compounds - raspberry has one compound that makes it
taste like what it is, strawberry has another, lemon has another,
etc. (even rum has one). But the taste of a meat comes from the
protein-and-fat structure of the meat as a whole. So really the only
effective meat flavoring is just meat itself - the meat will
sometimes be freeze-dried and powdered to make a somewhat
concentrated "meat flavoring" - this is usually listed on
ingredients labels as "beef powder" or "chicken powder" or whatever
the meat is then "powder". I have never heard of any kind of meat
flavorings other than meat powder, but rest assured if there are any
they are either isolated from meat itself or are compounds that
occur in meat just man-made instead (all flavorings work this way).
You might be worried about MSG, but when I looked at the ingredients
on the McDonald's website, there was no MSG in the burgers or the
grill sauce, although doubtless it's in some of the other sauces or
the breading for the chicken and fish patties. But you don't need to
worry about MSG anyway - it's just the sodium salt of glutamic acid,
which is an amino acid, which is what proteins are made out of. You
may have heard a lot of stuff about MSG, but rest assured if it
actually did do any of the bad stuff you've heard, you'd have
already experienced it's "evil", since it's already occurs naturally
in quite significant amounts in tomatoes and meat and other foods
that are naturally savory. The only thing to worry about is an
allergic reaction to MSG, which a few people have experienced
because they didn't know they were allergic - but since it's so rare
you shouldn't really worry about it. If you KNOW you're allergic to
MSG then you should know that hydrolyzed wheat or corn protein and
autolyzed yeast extract contain free glutamates (which is the "G"
part of "MSG" and the part that actually matters). Also, the other
"flavor enhancers" that you might have heard about, disodium
inosinate and sodium guanylate or something like that, are again
just the sodium salts of natural compounds, but this time of nucleic
acids insteads amino acids.
Edwin then sent us another thought on eating
McDonalds food.
I just emailed an answer to the McDonald's meat
thing and I forgot to say that the stuff definitely can be very bad
for you health-wise because it's very fattening, but that's your
problem, you should only eat such fattening foods every once in a
long while.
One thing that is indeed very bad for you that you might have heard
of is partially hydrogenated oils. This stuff is very bad for you
because it contains very high levels of trans fats (which don't even
exist in food naturally) which are indeed very, very bad for you,
and unfortunately this is what the fast-food places fry their fries
in.
So to sum up everything that Edwin has shared
with us... stay away from McDonalds... even though yes, it may
indeed be some form of real beef, it is still dripping and over
loaded with fat, clogging your arteries. So next time you get the
urge for a burger, think about your health and get a veggie burger.
Save the cows!
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