Many thanks to those who work so diligently to offer us an alternative to beef burgers:
You thought I might have gotten some sense didn’t you? Nah ….thanks to Facebook/Food Inc for this link. And to Mercy for Animals for their courage in exposing this.
Many of you who view this or read further will labor to convince yourself that this is the exception. (Full disclosure: I couldn't watch the whole thing.) If you are young enough, you think that turkey is an everyday food. When I was a kid, turkeys were local, maybe even “heritage,” though we didn’t think in those terms. It was just “turkey”. Butterball got into the act in the mid-late ‘50s. Their primary feature? Juicy. Nice and juicy.
They got that way by injecting stuff like fat, water, salt and chemicals (mono-and diglycerides, sodium phosphate, annatto color and artificial flavor) to turn what was often a dry, tough fowl into something resembling succulent. OK, maybe not succulent, but reasonably tasty. Round about the 80s turkey started to appear in grocery stores all carved up into breast “cutlets,” or ground up, just like chuck, and pristinely wrapped in plastic. White meat. Low fat. Healthy. I bought it. Any discerning consumer, striving for health bought it. After all, it wasn’t red meat. Readily finding turkey without the hours-long hassle of cooking the whole freakin’ bird, now that was a miracle.
Those healthful turkeys, whole, cut-up, ground, frozen, “fresh”, are dominated by factory farms under the auspices of Butterball, who sold over a billion pounds of the stuff last year. But health is about more than the color of the muscle you eat. True health includes the workers as well as the environment. Certainly, the practices in the above video can’t possibly lead to “health”.
What happens next? If this plays out like other factory farming revelations, nothing of consequence will come of it. It’s a rough economy. Someone will be sure to equate reforms with jeopardizing jobs. Sanctioning Butterball will hurt “job creators” and we know we can’t allow that to happen.
At the least, conscious consumers will vote with their forks, forgoing food that makes a mockery of life, regardless of how low on the food chain it resides.
I’ll stick with plants.
They got that way by injecting stuff like fat, water, salt and chemicals (mono-and diglycerides, sodium phosphate, annatto color and artificial flavor) to turn what was often a dry, tough fowl into something resembling succulent. OK, maybe not succulent, but reasonably tasty. Round about the 80s turkey started to appear in grocery stores all carved up into breast “cutlets,” or ground up, just like chuck, and pristinely wrapped in plastic. White meat. Low fat. Healthy. I bought it. Any discerning consumer, striving for health bought it. After all, it wasn’t red meat. Readily finding turkey without the hours-long hassle of cooking the whole freakin’ bird, now that was a miracle.
Those healthful turkeys, whole, cut-up, ground, frozen, “fresh”, are dominated by factory farms under the auspices of Butterball, who sold over a billion pounds of the stuff last year. But health is about more than the color of the muscle you eat. True health includes the workers as well as the environment. Certainly, the practices in the above video can’t possibly lead to “health”.
What happens next? If this plays out like other factory farming revelations, nothing of consequence will come of it. It’s a rough economy. Someone will be sure to equate reforms with jeopardizing jobs. Sanctioning Butterball will hurt “job creators” and we know we can’t allow that to happen.
At the least, conscious consumers will vote with their forks, forgoing food that makes a mockery of life, regardless of how low on the food chain it resides.
I’ll stick with plants.
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