Shit Sandwiches in the USA
According to a lengthy New York Times article yesterday about a young woman who contracted e. coli and ended up paralyzed from eating a hamburger, the term “shit sandwich” is more than just a snappy metaphor. You see, the secret ingredient in “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties” is, well, shit. Worse, the shit might not even be American, but illegal immigrant shit from Uruguay. Of course, we don’t know for sure, because it’s waaay too “big government” to have a bunch of bureaucrats running around keeping shit out of our food, so they don’t. The “market” is left to do that, and performs predictably.
Now, as anyone who has ever tossed one of those nasty pre-formed frozen hamburgers on the grill, only to be greeted by what looks like a ten-acre tire fire, we all instinctively know that these miserable excuses for meat are a little fatty, and maybe not the greatest quality meat, but we like to think that there isn’t any poop in them. We’re wrong. They’re what the Times delicately calls an “amalgam” of “meat products” from multiple slaughterhouses, with tasty-sounding names like ’50/50,” “fine lean textured beef,” and naturally, bread crumbs and spices, but just to add insult to injury, they toss a little shit in there for fun, presumably accidentally, and send it off to Sam’s Club for your barbecuing pleasure. Why wouldn’t they?
Technically, there is no “meat,” in the traditional sense, in these patties. 50/50, the largest ingredient, is trimmings of half meat and half fat, which is then augmented by a bit of meat from retired dairy cows and bulls to get the fat content down, and the piece de resistance that completes the concoction is “fine lean textured beef,” which is created by heating slaughterhouse offal that is 50-70% fat, removing excess fat in a centrifuge, and then dousing what’s left in ammonia to make the shit part smell better. Just like in a public restroom.
Cargill, the company which figured out a way to make $116.6 billion in revenues last year by the remarkable free-market feat of selling shit to people to eat, saves quite a bit of money this way, and passes the savings on to you. You see, “50/50″ only costs 60 cents a pound, and they saved another twenty cents a pound with that ammonia-scented stuff. and are therefore able to throw the feces in for free, kind of like a Gift with Purchase, since it turns out that it’s cheaper to leave the shit in than it would be to try to keep it out. I guess every party needs a pooper, and Cargill wants your party to be a success.
So they start early. The cattle often arrive at the slaughterhouse already dressed up in “smears of feedlot feces,” and it’s kind of tricky to to get them out of their smelly costumes using only a butcher’s knife, so, shit happens. ”Much can go wrong” in NYT parlance, when, say, a turd-smeared clamp grabs hold of a previously shit-free carcass, or a hastily wielded knife accidentally butters some meat with a fragrant “schmear” of merde. (I’ll say…) Then, the parts of the meat used for hamburger are, mysteriously, “from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces,” which seems a rather delicate way of saying that assholes are on the menu. Yum.
Of course, Cargill rigorously inspects its “product” with metal (!) detectors, since unlike shit, “nails and metal hooks” could damage the grinders, which although often “gnarly with old bits of meat” chop up a big dump just fine. Priorities, you know. USDA inspectors no longer even pretend that eating ground beef isn’t “a gamble,” as multiple suppliers both here and abroad don’t even bother, and in some cases aren’t allowed, to test meats for poop content, but occasionally recall the ripest stuff only when too many people get sick.
Toss one on the grill for me; this one’s for Upton Sinclair. And wipe that shit-eating grin off your face. I know I did.
I just finished reading that piece, Hag. Didn’t it put a curl on your lip and a curdle in your tummy?
I’m pretty much now of the vegetarian persuasion, but if I recall, you can still order directly from private butchers and meat packers in ways that you can inspect exactly which carcass your purchase will come from, or from which specific farm the beef was raised. In Amish country (Eastern PA, parts of Ohio, Indiana and I’m thinking Wisconsin, perhaps), you can order meat from lockers where the specific animal is known and ground meat isn’t mixed with multiple animal sources.
It’s not just ground beef, but ground pork, lamb, etc where this occurs. Kind of makes you want to go to kebobs – of the tofu variety.
With me, it started with “Fast Food Nation,” and the NYT article was a needed booster shot. I love meat, but I eat it so rarely because I’m often afraid of it… the safe kind is so danged expensive, too. I’m what you might call an unwilling semi-vegetarian. And, I prefer not to eat poop, when I have a choice in the matter.
Thanks a lot Hag. The next time a dear Repug tells me to eat shit, I can answer, I already do thanks to you and your unregulated buddies.
Did you know you can get fat from more things than fat or trying to soothe your emotions after being force-fed more Repug crap?
What If Being Fat Is Not Your Fault? America’s Obesity Epidemic May Be Fueled by Chemicals in Everyday Products
http://tinyurl.com/ybje9wq
I was going to entitle the piece “Eat Shit and Die,” but finally decided it was too vulgar, though accurate.
I’m still trying to figure out how they got cow poop in toll house cookie dough. What’s next, Jello? I dutifully searched the net to satisfy my craving for good beef, and the Hearst Ranch will happily ship me four ribeye’s guaranteed grass fed, for only $79.00!
I’m almost reconciled to a life of peanut butter sandwiches, but wasn’t peanut butter was on the list last year, as were lemons, lettuce, spinach, and God knows what else. I’m beginning to think there is a conspiracy to make me live on that damn farm after all.
Peanut butter sandwiches are tasty, and cheap to boot. Egg salad, with the right eggs, works, too, and the cheap brown tuna has less mercury, in the end. Then there’s beans, the magical fruit…
I eat meat when I’m feeling unusually rich, only.
Well, I shovel horse shit every day, so I am kind of guaranteed to be eating shit just about all the time. When you couple that with the time I have spent in the laboratory studying parasites, you can understand why I am a big fan of meat thermometers. We can’t get rid of it, so at least kill it. That way, we survive to eat another day. [No, I don't eat sushi very often at all.]
OT: If you want some great laughs tonight, go to Twitter.com and in the search box enter the hash tag: #ConservativeBible. A story came out today that Conservapedia is rewriting the Bible to remove “liberal language” so over at Twitter we’re helping them out with a few verses of our own. Some that I remember:
I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence I can see Russia.
And on the seventh day, God went Galt.
I looked, and behold a Palin horse, and its name was death.
Get your own damn loaves and fishes.
What a beautiful project! And behold the project’s elegant simplicity!
Ages ago, when I was in seventh grade Greek class, the teacher showed translation errors where the King James Version and the Vulgate (Latin Bible) both failed to translate some verses correctly, from the Bible’s original Greek.
And the Greek can be faulty, too, and contain mistranslations from Hebrew.
The “voice crying in the wilderness” wasn’t actually in the wilderness, for instance.
Is it any wonder that there are stories about Christians becoming atheists after learning Greek and Hebrew and then seeing the translation errors and then wondering how all those errors could be divinely inspired?
But the project notes indicate that the Conservapedia translation teams won’t be risking atheism by wasting time learning that pesky Greek alphabet and those pesky Greek noun declensions and those super pesky verb forms.
Second Aorist Participles? Who Needs ‘Em?
They found a shortcut – - they’re going to “translate” from the KJV into God’s English.
Why bother with the Greek language?
It’s an inferior and “inadequate” language,
http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project
*sigh*
Some of us still know how to cook, and food safety and bio-security aren’t just abstractions. I would no more buy frozen hamburger patties, or ground beef in some opaque plastic wrap, than I would attempt to survive going over Niagra Falls in a barrel. Unbaked cookie dough can carry a whole host of pathogens; more so if that cookie dough was formulated in some bulk assembly plant. Pre-prepared foods carry a risk. I view the deli potion of the grocery store with a great deal of suspicion, have four different meat thermometers and use ‘em all, and routinely scrub my counter tops with a weak bleach solution. But, I also live on a farm.
Potluck dinners where I am expected to bring some dish cooked at home gives me the willies. I’m never sure how well anyone else manages food safety issues, and I figure I have built a resistance to any number of microbes that might originate in my own kitchen.
I was at a USDA seminar over fifteen years ago where an extension agent lamented that they had to put cooking instructions on food packages/part of food labeling because they could no longer assume the average adult knew how to cook.
I think people who eat sushi/raw fish have a death wish. Same for steak tartare. Food is fuel. I try to keep it in perspective although I recognize that Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption, and Goffman’s masks play out in the realm of food as well as haute couture, Escalades, and the number of square feet in your domicile.
End of rant.
I have fond memories of delicious steak tartare, and Caesar salad with raw egg, and all kinds of things I’d be too scared to eat anymore. It’s sad, really. Good thing I never liked sushi, anyway. It’s the only thing I won’t miss.
Yep. I know kids who grew up drinking whole, unpasteurized milk, too. Their mom was a nutritionist from Cornell’s School of Ag. She figured the “bugs” were good for them. ‘Course she also knew the dairyman. Small herd; about 100 Jersey cows. You can manage those kinds of small operations such that you can keep tight controls. A dairy of 1500 cows is considered small anymore. You can’t control that size operation that tightly. Same for hen/egg growers, and small scale beef operations. All gone, or almost gone.
The big thing here is raising your own hens for eggs. It’s been legal in Portland for about ten years, and has caught on so much that even the suburbs are getting into it. Our urban growth boundary also keeps agricultural land preserved near the city, so we have pretty good farmer’s markets…. food grown near where the people eat it is such a revolutionary idea, you know.
Glad you brought up backyard chickens, Bystander and Cocktail Hag. You can do a lot worse than humiliating yourself at the county extension office and asking for the beginner bookss on raising chickens for eggs or broilers. Home raised chickens are happy, & they’ll sing you their egging song whenever they are about to lay theirs. You can still find egg scales on eBay, should you wish to go large scale and grade/sell them. The yolks will be a much brighter sunnier orange, and the chickens are champion bug eaters. The rescued chickens I cared for were often happy two or even occasionally three-a-day layers, and oversized eggs were often the norm when they went out on pasture with the horses.
Tangentially – to play devil’s wee advocate for a minute on the Conservapedia idiocy, many religions had public health components manifested by dietary “laws” and rituals. The anti- shellfish & pork (cloven hooved animals) components of Jewish dietary law I would imagine protected against red tide toxicity and parasitic pork, among other stomach beasties. I can’t get quite as exercised about Biblical food traditions when seen through the lens of “best practices at the time” which may have been directly related to and protective of arable lands, lands suitable for grazing, food safety and public health.
However, I doubt that the “skollars” at Conservapedia will have actually looked at such inconvenient things as facts, historical data and translation accuracy as ondelette and others have pointed out.
At least when you eat shit, it’s consensual. I don’t think those “one cheek sneaks” are fair. I’ll have a look-see. I can always use a laugh.
This is one fear that, as a cook, I’ll have to look upon with a jaundiced eye. Sushi is quite wonderful, in my opinion, and the Japanese have been eating it for hundreds and hundreds of years. The mercury — a late addition — is probably more dangerous than the bacteria, which have evolved along with us over the thousands of years we’ve had kitchens.
I remember about thirty years ago, an overzealous — again, my opinion — food safety office in Los Angeles tried to ban Peking duck from Chinatown. The complaint was that the cooking process took too long, and took place at too low a temperature, to prevent bacteria growth in the duck. The local merchants stopped hanging the ducks outside their shops on strings, but they didn’t stop making Peking duck. After an enormous uproar — we’ve been cooking and eating Peking duck for five thousand years, and the fact that there are ten times as more of us than there are of you should tell you something — etc., etc. The city gave up. Along with thousands of my Han brethren, I cheered.
Americans won’t eat cheese because it has mold on it, or fish because it smells, or green things unless they’re cooked in bacon grease. Traditionally, the Inuit ate mostly fat — there was hardly anything else to eat in the winter, and they needed the calories. Most Hindus eat no meat at all.
Incidences of chronic diet-related and genetic diseases vary amongst these different populations, true, but I’ve yet to see any correlation that’s specific enough to ban this or that food in a population which has traditionally eaten it. Perhaps we’ll find out eventually that there are such correlations, such as arteriosclerosis in beef and ice-cream eaters, or colon cancer among those who eat large amounts of fermented soy, but I’d say that so far, the jury is still out.
Oh, and the virtues of peanut butter…? One word: aflatoxin. Look it up. Bleach on your cutting board and countertops? Maybe, but maybe it will simply kill of the bacteria that you can live with, leaving more room for those to grow which you can’t live with. Look at hospitals. It’s now pretty clear that they’re the principal breeding ground for the most dangerous bacteria we know, and it isn’t because they’re dirty. On the contrary, it appears to be because sterilization techniques and antibiotics have goosed bacterial evolution ahead of our own, and destroyed any hope of reasonable symbiosis between us — at least within the confines of the places where we’re supposed to go when we need healing.
I’m not arguing that industrial food production doesn’t bring new dangers, or that the Bush administration’s version of laissez faire in food inspection and regulation isn’t deplorable — and dangerous — but I am saying that being too squeamish about what we eat will leave a lot of us ignorant of the splendors of one of our most ancient and satisfying art forms.
CH, I’m in the (almost) enforced semi-vegetarian camp with you. Locally produced meat and eggs seems to be makng a comeback around here. One farmer even sells buffalo meat ( from a big portable cooler)right along with the vegetables. Another sells at the farmers’ market . (In the parking lot at one of my jobs.) It cost a little more than the mass-produced stuff at the grocery store, but not that much. There’s always fish , as there’s water everywhere here. (‘Course I have to make the time – not always possible) Or mushrooms . Sulfur Shelf anyone? Tastes like chicken . Really!
OT, the WaPoo is looking for a new columnist . CH ( and others ),why not give it a shot? If Fred’s off his meds that day, you might have shot.:) It’d be a vast improvement . Talk about a shit sandwich. ( You being the good filling, of course
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/pundit-contest/index.html
Hmmmm. Something tells me I’m unqualified, considering their formidable stable of “talent.”
Well, you drove me to it, Mike. My application to the WaPoo is my next post.
I nominate this one for submission to the Who-wants-to-work-cheaper-than-Froomkin contest : http://www.cocktailhag.com/blog/thrownshoes/things-you-cant-take-back/
)))))))))))))
That was a cute one…. It’s funny how things written just a few months ago seem new again. Maybe it’s the booze. Still. it’s way to saucy and controversial for the WaPoo, unless Krauthammer wrote it.