Best Reason Yet To Go Vegan

Once you think about it, meat is actually pretty gross. Anybody want to take a crack at what this picture's of? You can tell from the background that it wasn't taken at a TCBY. That's right, kids; it's mechanically separated chicken.

I ate a ton of this as a youth. Hell, what do you think Chicken McNuggets are made from? Spam is a little more obvious, of course. Last night I ordered a dozen boneless wings from the Wing Zone down the street, and yes, they were typically delicious. But after taking a little bite I looked at the mincey gray meat and thought, "Hey, this is actually mechanically separated chicken."

So what is mechanically separated meat? As we all know from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the meat industry doesn't like to waste anything. And that includes the small pieces of flesh still attached to the bones after the meat is torn off. Oh, but how to remove it? The bones are forced through a high-pressure sieve or similar mechanical device and the teeny pieces of meat are ground into a "slurry." This thick, gelatinous liquid can be used for several purposes, such as pouring into chicken nugget- or hotdog-shaped molds and the like.

Of course, this process does decimate the amount of nutrients in the meat, which is why in the early 1980s consumer groups pressured the FDA to regulate the amount of MSM allowed in certain foods. Hotdogs, for instance, can only contain 20% MSM. Concerns were raised again in the 1990s with the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) scare in Great Britian. BSE is carried through the brain and spinal cord, and bits of these made their way into the meat with cow vertebrae. So today the production of mechanically separated beef carries a stigma.

Also wonder why Chicken McNuggets are made from all-white meat? That gets pretty expensive, doesn't it? Not really. The dark meat used in slurries merely has the myoglobin (the pigment in muscle that undergoes regular use, which makes the meat dark in color and a little more rough) removed, using emulsifiers and a centrifuge. It was a doctor at the University of Georgia who perfected this process. Go 'Dawgs!

So, wanna stick to Morningstar Farms from now on? (With all fairness, I'm sure there are similar processes used in making meat substitutes that are just as repulsive.)