Posts Tagged ‘beef’
Yuk! McDonald’s Crappy Meat
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
I’ll bet that you did not know that when fast food restaurants such as McDonalds say they use 100% real beef that they are not being entirely truthful. Well, being a large, unethical corporate giant you might actually have thought that but you’ll be surprised just how far McDonalds and other purveyors of hamburgers are willing to go to widen their corporate margins.
An article in the New York Times reveals that a company known as Beef Products has been selling its core product, a beef fat derivative, to fast food operators and even school lunch facilities across the US. What exactly is a beef fat derivative you ask? Well, and I was as surprised as you, it is a liquified derivative of beef fat trimmings from slaughterhouses that used to be destined for dog food and other non-human uses because it was deemed unfit for human consumption and it was susceptible to e-coli and salmonella infections.
However, apparently an enterprising entrepreneur named Eldon N. Roth figured out that if a person injects enough Ammonia gas into this liquified mass of beef fat trimmings then it becomes less susceptible to e-coli and salmonella infection. Nice. But, as the story points out, apparently it also causes beef products that this crap is mixed in with to reek of Ammonia. That’s right. Because this very enterprising gentleman injects this beef fat derivative with Ammonia he was able to gain USDA approval to have it mixed in with regular hamburger products targeted for human consumption.
Thus, restaurant chains and school lunch programs purchase hamburger that has been diluted with this crap because it reduces the overall cost of the hamburger allowing the purchasing parties, such as McDonalds, to actually produce more end products (hamburgers) for the same amount of money. The downside of this is that we have been eating hamburger products that are now diluted with nasty beef fat trimmings that used to be fed to dogs and livestock. But it has also increased our potential exposure to e-coli and salmonella infections and, as the article discusses, there are many documented cases of Beef Products’ derivative meat products now testing positive for infection.
Oh, and if you wonder why this company has been allowed to remain in operation–one need look no further than Eldon Roth’s political contribution records in which, you guessed it, more than $31,000 in 2008 went to Republican representatives for office with some of them being directly involved in formulating food safety policies. It might also interest you to know that Eldon, responsible for the production and treatment of millions of dollars worth of meat products annually which we feed to our children, “invented” the Ammonia treatment process and equipment used in his company.
While this might seem fairly innocuous or even admirable, you might also want to know that the man that is responsible for contaminating the majority of the nation’s meat supply has no scientific or engineering background OR education and thus does not understand the full ramifications of what he doing from a health or scientific perspective. In fact, he has no college training at all. What he is good at is maximizing profits. That should get you worried if you have children or are concerned about your long-term health.
Tags: Ammonia, ammonia gas, ammonia treatment, bad meat, beef, beef products inc., contamination, e-coli, Eldon, Eldon N. Roth, Eldon Roth, fast food restaurants, fat trimmings, food, hamburger, infection, McDonalds, meat, Nice, salmonella, salmonella infection, salmonella infections, school lunch, school lunch programs, US, usda
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