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You Are The [Magical Ponycorn Meat] You Didn't Even Know You Were Eating
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is my most favorite thing to eat most of the time: rib-eye beef steak, cooked medium rare. Steak is so fantastic that it's become a cliche staple main course for restaurants that want to garner a reputation as being a ritzy venue for fine dining.
Beef steaks are cuts of meat from these animals:
Wait. I don't think that's right. Beef is cut from cows, and that's a horse
Well, you can certainly play this game better than most food inspectors, apparently.
If you haven't heard, about six major meat producers in Europe as of this writing have had their products tested on the shelves as being 'adulterated' with either horse or pork (in some instances, the product was entirely horse); ABP Food Group, Spangero, Comigel, HJ Schypke, Frigilunch and Sodexo.
Eh, a little pony meat never hurt anyone
The issue is less that horse meat was substituted in (because it's a cheaper meat) - although that itself is certainly taboo in places like Ireland - and more that any meat could've been substituted in at all and then sold to consumers. People could've been eating rats or war orphans from Darfur for all the inspectors apparently knew (or rather, didn't know).
That's an exaggeration. No company would actually sell people Soylent Green
It is an exaggeration, but this kind of lapse in regulation is dangerous, and consumers have every right to know what the fuck they are putting in their mouths.
That is what remains of the Hall family; Peter Hall was killed when he consumed some meat that was contaminated with BSE. About a dozen deaths used to occur every year in the UK as a result of someone eating a meat product contaminated with BSE; the regulatory agencies were supposed to have sharpened their pencils and buckled down to solve the problem of lax regulation.
And now we learn, apparently, that half of the time they don't even know what kind of meat is in the fucking package, much less what the meat might or might not be contaminated with.
I have had a longstanding boycott against meat products because it's my opinion that breeding animals for slaughter isn't ethical (especially now that synthetic meats are entering the marketplace); I'd eat meat, because it's one of the best sources for protein available and, I won't lie, it tastes wonderful - but I won't buy it.
The recent scandal in Europe has made me rethink my policy, and pushed me - at least for now - into full vegetarian status. Because I don't know about you, but I'm not comfortable consuming something that can be labeled '100% FOOD!' and yet nobody has actually checked that this is a true statement before it's packaged and sitting on a supermarket shelf.
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
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Just ask this guy
http://i56.tinypic.com/16ku96r.gif
I don't think anything changed in the long run. People forgot all about it after the story faded.
Other European countries are not nearly as rigorous. The other issue is that pretty much everything that has turned out to be horse has been heavily processed somewhere in its supply chain: so stuff like pre-made burgers, ready meals, processed sausage, etc.
Meh. I'll go against the grain and say that was overblown. It looks unappetizing, and processed food in general is kinda meh, but at least, you know, it was the right animal and regulators knew it was going in there. The customer may not have realized what was in their burger, but then the customer also doesn't want to know how sausage gets made. It was, at least, being made in the open in accordance with established standards and blah blah blah.
This whole horseburger thing, though. Yeah. If you can't tell me whether that's horse or cow, we're seeing a huge systemic problem. That's not a matter of "some food processing methods may be unappealing to customers if they saw them," that's "regulators have no fucking idea what's going on inside the factory."
The pink slime issue was ZOMG, and most Mad Cow scares here are ZOMG, even though neither are really worth freaking out over. This regulator thing will probably go duh-wha, which is a shame, because you know, holy shit.
I can't disagree on the matter of the 'lean finely textured beef' except to say that I don't think you can call 'meat' that has been processed so heavily that it's become pink goop 'beef' in any sense. But, fundamentally, yes - it did come from a cow.
This 'mystery meat labeled as 100% beef' scandal, of all the news distractions lately, has been the one that's struck me on a personal level the most. Last night I literally opened my freezer, looked at the steak in it and thought, "They probably have no fucking idea what that is actually made of. I have no idea what it's actually made of. I mean, it's very likely to just be a cut of beef, and it's silly to think that there's anything necessarily wrong with the local meat producers just because six of them in Europe were scamming people. But still. I don't want to eat that anymore."
And I love steak. I can't even describe how much I love a well cooked rib-eye.
But, for now, the idea of eating one is disgusting to me.
There are plenty of cultures in which consuming horse is normal, or even a delicacy for special occasions. Given that people were unable to discern, on their own, that they were consuming horse rather than cow it seems that we can conclude that they enjoy eating horse, so long as they don't think that what they are eating is horse.
It's not the case that the horse meat served was not food, or not edible, or not a source of protein, or not of nutritional value. So, your last sentence, and reaction to the situation, seems a bit silly. It's not that persons were eating non-food items. Rather, they were eating a food that wasn't the food they thought they were eating.
It's a problem of cultural biases and preferences, not an issue of actual nutritional concerns for the biological organism.
So, a reasonable response would not be to avoid meat altogether, but rather to simply add "horse" to the list of things that are delicious.
The problem isn't that it was horse meat - the problem is that they called it a specific type of food, and regulators were apparently none the wiser.
To use my exaggerated example: If someone packaged up dead human being meat, sold it as, "100% BEEF!" and you bought it and thought, "Gee whiz, this is fantastic beef!" would it then be fair to say that well obviously you really enjoy eating other human beings?
People were scammed into buying types of food that they didn't realize they were buying. If the producers were able to slip-in horse, it would've been trivial for them to slip in, well, whatever the fuck they wanted that was cheap / readily available. The only thing stopping them from doing it is the regulation body, and it failed spectacularly.
Moreover, if they didn't even know what type of meat it was, how the fuck could they have known it was safe for your consumption?
I agree that the issue of not wanting to eat some animals over other animals simply because of how cute they are can be dumb.
However it's kind of important for food labels to match what's inside.
I personally enjoy horsemeat, but I also enjoy knowing what I'm eating. Especially if I'm paying a premium price for this 100% Angus Lean Ground Beef.
Sure. We just need to be clear in the distinction between "eating other human beings" and "the idea of eating other human beings".
In your example, Player-A consumes Meat-X, and enjoys the taste / flavor / texture of Meat-X. We can say that "Player-A enjoyed the taste / flavor / texture of Meat-X." If we then learn that Meat-X is Human, we can replace any instances of "Meat-X" with "Human". When we replace "Meat-X" with "Human" we may find that Player-A has a strong reaction against the idea of consuming Meat-X. And that's fine. We simply need to articulate the distinction between:
1) The act of eating Meat-X, which resulted in enjoyment.
2) The idea of eating Meat-X, which resulted in emotive opposition.
When the act of eating Meat-X results in enjoyment, and the idea of eating Meat-X results in emotive opposition, it may be time to alter one's mental conception of what eating Meat-X entails.
Time to add "horse" to the list of delicious things.
Honestly, I think regulation at the idea of eating horse versus cow is silly. That's not the problem.
The problem is that this means, from a quality assurance standard, that we have no way of knowing if it was food, or if it would kill people, or anything.
At which point the only thing keeping the producers from killing people is that they don't want to, and that it's bad PR. But history has shown that at some point, saving a few extra bucks overrides that, and your peanut butter kills you.
And that's just what goes on in a system that supposedly has some semblance of regulation. Prior to that? Anything goes. As long as the number of customers killed isn't enough to significantly diminish the market, go wild.
If they can freely substitute horse for cow, we are losing the semblance of regulation. That's bad.
Hey guys, whatcha talkin' about?
Or just Meat-Y with enough salmonella or E. coli that it may as well be.
Then your emotive state becomes irrelevant, because you are dead.
If the plant is freely substituting Meat-Y for Meat-X, this is the next step.
But you are really missing the entire fucking point here. Don't worry, you're not alone.
To some degree. I don't understand the actual bio-chemical distinctions between cow-protein and horse-protein, and don't care to research it at the moment. But if these two proteins are functionally identical, with respect to human nutrition, then I'm not sure why it matters.
If there actually is a functional distinction? Then, sure, it's important that consumers know that they're eating horse-protein and not cow-protein. But if those proteins are functionally identical? Fuck it.
The other part of this issue, that people seem to ignore, is that it's not practical to expect food regulators to test every single steak. Just looking at this article:
"The Food Standards Agency (FSA) on Friday said it had conducted 2,501 tests, 2,472 of which had come back negative for horsemeat levels above 1 percent, with 29 results testing positive for horsemeat levels above 1 percent."
That's a lot of tests, and not a lot of instances of horsey.
In a perfect world a food regulator would know the exact story of where my particular steak came from, down to the name of the cow. But we don't live in a perfect world. So we play the odds.
Edit: This seems like an instance of the thing that happens every now and then, when someone looks at Food Defect Action Levels and freaks out because they've probably eaten insect fragments. It seems like the best strategy is to read The Jungle, and get over it.
I understand this reference!
*glee*
Exactly.
People need to get over the fact that it was horse, but then stay very, very angry at the fact that it was NOT cow.
Because the realm of "not cow" includes things worse than horse.
So, let's talk real world here, J:
If you were sold a food product that you were told was entirely cow, and it turned-out to made of human, would that make you mad? Mad enough to, say, at least consider contacting a solicitor?
Yeah, some people in Ireland were rightly pissed-off that they were deceived into eating animals that they had moral objections against eating. Apparently that's just 'oogie-grossout reaction' in your book, because apparently you get to judge what is or isn't a legitimate moral objection.
I wouldn't have that same objection to horse meat, but I can hardly begrudge someone who does and was scammed into doing something they think is unethical.
Allergies.
Have you not read J's post history?
Guy literally thinks he's ruled emotion out of his reactions.
Which you may not care about but others do!
You are incredibly ignorant and misinformed, you know that, J?
As someone already pointed-out in this very thread, which I guess you couldn't be bothered to read before coming to do your usual pseudo-intellectual tapdance:
There are already your supposedly 'impossible' systems in place, because the countries involved decided that it was important enough to have those systems. They aren't perfect, but they do make sure that the overwhelming majority of the time, the meat in the package is what it says it is.
There is a gradient of meat quality. Our cow-protein if you will, is derived from a standard chain of protocols and sterility and so on. Our horse-protein is derived from ???????. From a quality perspective, that is really gross and potentially harmful.
Morality / Ethics is dumb. Go read the history of western ethical / moral debates, and try to come away from it with the notion that this results from correct thinking, and not just a reification of emotive nonsense.
Ok, so that's the moral / ethical considerations solved.
As to the "I thought it was X, but it was Y" and my reaction? I'm not sure. It seems like I would only be in that situation if I had my own food lab, and did tests on all my meat purchases, which isn't likely to happen. So let's stipulate that I buy X, pay for it, and then while walking out the door someone jumps out and says, "Surprise! You just bought human!"
In that case I hadn't consumed the product, so there's no need to be irritated on those grounds. If I was somehow prevented from eating the product, or read that the human-protein was not healthy, and so decided to not eat it for health reasons, I guess I would be irritated that I'd spent $X on something I didn't / couldn't eat. But it still doesn't seem like a big deal.
I try to have realistic assessments of the situation in which I live. I'm paying money for a food item that came from I-know-not-where, and am trusting "the system" to have deemed the item fit for consumption. But I don't think that some regulator stared at my particular steak, or particular can of soup. I'm just playing the odds in the hope that I don't get the can full of flies, or the steak full of horse.
It doesn't seem like a big deal to me, given that I'm aware of the fact that the bulk of the food industrial complex is disgusting and problematic. Said another way, I'm not as shocked as other people seem to be...and I wonder why other people are shocked.
And this right here is just stupid. I can only assume at this point that you've immediately jumped to not actually reading posts.
But yes, the news will continue to run this as "You may have eaten horse, which is bad because nobody wants to eat a horse" and not "You may have eaten horse, which is bad because if horses are just wandering into slaughterhouses and getting processed blindly, the outlook for the cowboy riding it at the time isn't so good either".
No no, you see, there are trace amounts of insects in any given meat therefore standards aren't necessary.
Yeah I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with that.
What if you got the food home, ate it, and then were told the following day on the news, "Did you eat Beef Corp's 100% BEEF! product? Because it turns out that was actually made of Darfur war orphans."
Because that is the equivalent to what actually happened in the real word: horse breeders in Ireland bought food 'beef', ate it, and were then told that they were eating horses. If your objection to their anger is 'Well, ethics is DUMB!, they told me so in grade 10, before I dropped out of high school!', I don't find it very compelling.
I'd be more worried about where the spurs and denim end up.
This article goes into why we can't buy horse meat in the U.S. for consumption. I like this little jewel of reasoning: "Opponents of horse slaughter essentially say eating horses is not part of American culture, equating it to the slaughter of other pets."
We can't eat horses because we don't eat horses.
Pfft.
A correction teambot is inbound.
No.
We can't have perfect standards, therefore the standards we have are not perfect. And if you expect perfection, you've failed to grasp the nature of our standards, with respect to perfection.
Yes you have indeed failed horribly at this.