Would you like some fries with your wood pulp pink slime burger? Anyone have a hankering for some fast food at McDonalds or Wendys?
How Fast Food Providers Beat Inflation – Add Wood Pulp To Burgers
Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
On Monday, Quartz published an article by Devin Cohen titled, There is a Secret Ingredient in Your Burgers: Wood Pulp. Given the headline and people’s already present suspicion regarding all of the shady and potentially dangerous ingredients hidden in food items, the article gained a lot of traction. In subsequent days, most journalists and bloggers have focused on the dangers of this additive (unclear) and whether or not it is pervasive throughout the food chain as opposed to just fast food (it appears to be).
The one angle that has not been explored as much is the overall trend. Let’s go ahead and assume that wood pulp is a safe thing to consume, it certainly seems to have no nutritional value whatsoever. So why are companies inserting it into food items? To mask inflation and earn more profits most likely. This was a major theme I focused on last year in a series of pieces on stealth inflation and food fraud, a couple of which can be read below:
New Study Shows 59% of “Tuna” Sold in the U.S. Isn’t Tuna
New Study Shows: Food Fraud Soared 60% Last Year
The Quartz article notes that:
There may be more fiber in your food than you realized. Burger King, McDonald’s and other fast food companies list in the ingredients of several of their foods, microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) or “powdered cellulose” as components of their menu items. Or, in plain English, wood pulp.
The emulsion-stabilizing, cling-improving, anti-caking substance operates under multiple aliases, ranging from powdered cellulose to cellulose powder to methylcellulose to cellulose gum. The entrance of this non-absorbable fiber into fast food ingredients has been stealthy, yet widespread: The compound can now be found in buns, cheeses, sauces, cakes, shakes, rolls, fries, onion rings, smoothies, meats—basically everything.
The cost effectiveness of this filler has pushed many chains to use progressively less chicken in their “chicken” and cream in their “ice cream.”
This is the part that really interests me. When did these companies first introduce this substance into their products and what is the growth trend? My guess is that as food costs have risen, the proportion of non-nutritonal fillers has increased substantially. That said, I’d like to see some data and I haven’t yet.
My big takeaway here is the same as last year’s when I first started writing about the trend. As the cost of food continues to rise, the cost of not paying attention to what you are eating rises exponentially. Companies will continue to try to mask inflation by shrinking package sizes, and when that is no longer possible, increasingly inserting empty fillers (or worse) into their products.
Meanwhile, the following video is a telling spoof on the ingredients in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.
On a related note, if you haven’t read my recent post on BPA, definitely take the time: National Geographic Reports – Chemicals Causing Infertility in Pigs are Present Throughout Human Consumer Goods.
Bon Appétit.
Before it’s over we will be eating mud cookies like the people in Africa .
Wood pulp burgers? Anyone who eats at McShit’s must have shit for brains. Nice to know our fucking government is protecting us from harmful/deadly food…..
The Cost Of Your July 4th Burger Has Never Been Higher
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/03/2014 15:04 -0400
Tomorrow, Americans will celebrate their independence from an over-taxing tyrant by eating and drinking to excess – and rightly so. However, what many will find as they pile into their friendly local grocer (Costco), is that the price of the July 4th smorgasbord has never (ever) been higher (as perhaps, just perhaps, another tyrannical entity – the Fed – has taxed them in a much more pernicious manner). Ground beef burgers have never been more expensive (+16.5% from last year)… and nor has white bread, American cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, ice cream, and chips…
Your July 4th Burger has never been more expensive… (up 16.5% from last year!!)
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But it’s not just Burgers… Bloomberg has compiled an index of the seven staples of July 4th…The barbecue index tracks ground beef, white bread, American cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, ice cream and potato chips… and that has never been higher…
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Starvation was so problematic during the siege of Stalingrad, the Germans mixed sawdust into the food to bulk it up…
They did it out of desperation. The shitty fast food chains do it to maximize profits.
“Emulsion-stabilizing, cling-improving, anti-caking substance…”
Does ANYONE believe this pile of horse-shit? Yeah, they ain’t foolin’ anyone… Fuck it. If we need meat, if I don’t hunt it myself, raise the animal ourselves or buy a cow from our neighbor and have it slaughtered, I ain’t buying it anymore… just, no.
I remember hearing about how someone had a McDonald’s vanilla shake analyzed. Main ingredient was plastic. I have no reason to doubt this.
Guess that explains the “unexplained fibers” we’ve been reading about in fast food.
These thread titles are messing with my head. heh heh
I thought it was going to be about SSS getting wood …. and I’m not talking about his golf club.
ACTUAL picture of SSS at his 80th birthday party.
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From the link in the article —- “New Study Shows 59% of “Tuna” Sold in the U.S. Isn’t Tuna”
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“It seems that “white tuna” should be avoided in particular as “84% of fish samples labeled “white tuna” were actually escolar, a fish that can cause prolonged, uncontrollable, oily anal leakage.”
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So for any of you old curs experiencing OILY ANAL LEAKAGE …. the good news is your ass might stop leaking if you lay off the tuna. The bad news happens if your ass still leaks even though you stopped.
I’ve had this book in my “books to buy” folder for a few years now. lol
Anyway, I read that 85%, or more of “extra virgin olive oil” …. isn’t. In a study involving about a dozen supermarket chains and about a hundred or so brands, only about 5 or 6 were actually extra virgin.
The bottom line: If you’re not paying at least $25, or more, for a quart of olive oil, you’re probably getting crap. (Says Stucky who just bought an $8 quart of Trader Joe’s ‘premium’ extra virgin olive oil. Ha!!)
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Stucky,
“Oily anal leakage”? BAHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAH!!
Okay… that’s going into my lexicon… thanks for the laugh. 🙂
What the fuck are you people bitching about? Nutritionists have been saying for years that Americans need more fiber in their diets.
I’m with Z. Non-digestible, calorie-free fiber? Sounds more like a solution than a problem. Hopefully Walmart will incorporate it into burger patties sold there.
McSoylent’s needs to add Tabasco or Tapatio to their condiment tray.
Sticky,
At least I can still get it up on my own you limped-dicked Viagra addict.
I just got back from buying a sandwich; the same sandwich in the past was something less than $10. Now it’s over $10. I commented to the girl making the sandwich something like “OH the prices went up?” and she took it from there. It was like I hit a hot button with this girl. “ Everywhere you go things are getting more expensive”. Clearly showing a bit of pissedoffedness.
Hmm the sheep are waking up!!
I pay $6 per pound for grass finished ground beef from an Amish farmer + 20% for a food club to ship it down to Miami. $7.20 total. A lunch of a pound of grass finished beef cots me about what my family pays for their fast food meal. The farm strictly follows WAPF westonaprice.org guidelines and has been doing it a long time, so their soil has had a chance to become exceptional. This quality of meat is “too expensive” for but a handful of expensive Miami restaurants with celebrity chefs (when they buy grass finished beef, they buy the cheapest cuts from the cheapest farmers).
Now a McDonald’s burger is 4 per pound or 6 per pound. I’m pretty confident McDs’ franchisees pay a whole lot less than I do per pound, probably under $1 per pound, maybe under $0.50. So the costs are the burger must be rents on high volume streets, advertising, all that parking, all the packaging, a place to pee, etc.
“…They had always been accustomed to eat a great deal of smoked sausage, and how could they know that what they bought in America was not the same–that its color was made by chemicals, and its smoky flavor by more chemicals, and that it was full of “potato flour” besides? Potato flour is the waste of potato after the starch and alcohol have been extracted; it has no more food value than so much wood, and as its use as a food adulterant is a penal offense in Europe, thousands of tons of it are shipped to America every year….”
“… They were regular alchemists at Durham’s; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised “potted chicken,”–and it was like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically– who knows? said Jurgis’ friend; the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was “potted game” and “potted grouse,” “potted ham,” and “deviled ham”–de-vyled, as the men called it. “De-vyled” ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something…”
“…It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a- minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white–it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one–there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water–and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some of it they would make into “smoked” sausage–but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for this they would charge two cents more a pound. …”
All quotes from Upton Sinclair, “The Jungle” – 1906
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/140
Now, THIS is an interesting read. Seems as if not much has changed in 100+ years…
Well, supposedly, that is why we have a USDA. I think a lot has changed, it’s just the government is running it for their profit at the moment, as antithetical to a free market economy as it gets.
Yesterday I saw a sign by the side of the road for a barn sale so I pulled down the driveway for a quick look. I asked if they had any hay forks, windrow rakes or log dogs and the guy was all smiles. I found what I was looking for plus a few extras and then brought up trade for meat. Both he and his wife lit up, we came to a mutually beneficial agreement and I took the tools I had found and returned later that afternoon with my youngest son in tow and a big box of meats- ground beef, chorizo, maple cured ham, skirt steak, ribeyes, sweet Italian sausage and a couple of pints of dark maple syrup.
I don’t expect that most people would want to do their own slaughter and frankly I don’t blame them. You have to be committed to your food and your animals on a pretty serious level to do something like that and you need a lot more than a good rifle and a sharp knife. What I don’t understand is why so many people who have the knowledge of our current food systems still avoid finding a local or even not that distant farmer to purchase from directly. Knowing how someone cares for his livestock, what kind of feeds they eat, how its processed is no different than researching your physician or mechanic and is in most cases far more important. Not everyone needs a heart bypass surgery or a new transmission, but every one of us eats food daily. Is there anything we do that is more personal, more tied to the overall physical health of our body than the nourishment we take from our daily meals?
I get the price conscious decision, but the fact is that as an excuse it isn’t only weak, it’s not even true. A pound of filet mignon I sell for $25 is going to provide the protein requirement for 3 adults. It would cost $50 in ground chuck from WalMart to equal the same protein because of filler and fat. The added costs associated with soil depletion, petrochemical usage, and future medical costs are part of the price no one factors in- never mind that when the last family farm is gone and the multinational food corps take over all production they will no longer have to keep prices lower and will charge whatever they like.
I get folks who come up to the farm and purchase a live animal and wait while I slaughter it for them. Some will even take a hand in butchering it and packing it up. Their cost is on average about $4 a pound for an entire animal from chickens and goats all the way to hogs and beeves. People with a decent freezer can feed their family well for months if not a whole year for a thousand dollars. How many hours of their life would they spend on grocery runs, how many gallons of gas, how many blah tasting meals or stomach upsets?
Wood pulp.
Really?
There are times in your life when you are so powerless that people who are bigger and stronger will hold you down and make you hit yourself in the face with your own hands and say “why are you hitting yourself?” Most of us grow out of that and learn to stand up for for ourselves and refuse to be bullied and pushed around. A lot of us decide to keep taking it and some of us even continue to abuse themselves without being forced to. Eating meat filled with wood pulp or worse yet, feeding it to your loved ones is the kind of self abnegation and masochism I just cannot fathom. And the worst part is that the ones who continue to do so make it so that sooner or later, no one will be able to opt out.