Never met a fry I didn't like

ditto

 

I have made the observation that you can tell what part of the country you are in by how they serve french fries in the local eateries. In New England they put malt vinegar on them. In California they ask you if you want "french fry dip" on the side, which is like Russian dressing. In New Mexico when you order fries they ask you if you want jalapenos on them. In the south and a few odd cities you find spicy battered fries. In the midwest they want to put brown gravy on them--lots of it! They put gravy on everything including the pie. Learn to say "hold the gravy" in the corn belt.

 

There is less pink slime in chicken McMuggets than you think. McNuggets turn out to be 56% corn!

"The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There's some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the "leavening agents": sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are "anti-foaming agents" like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable.

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."

 

No, there is actually a chunk of chicken inside a McNugget with all of those preservatives and flavorings. The pink slime is "mechanically separated chicken" which must be labeled as such. Machines grind chicken carcasses that have already had the legs, wings and breasts taken off and force them through a sieve to catch all the bones. What’s left is pasty, finely ground chicken meat, “recovered” from between the ribs, the backs and the other parts. They do it with pork, and turkey, too. What this stuff goes into is hot dogs and bologna. They once did it with beef, but stopped it because of mad cow disease, since bits of spinal cord could be included so it is now considered to be inedible.

If you've ever wondered where lips, tongues and genitalia go at the meat packers . . . into the baloney bin to be ground and emulsified into meat slurry. Some of it ends up as filler in cheap hamburger, school lunches, and cheap frozen meals, too.

Food critics call it "Soylent Pink".