There have been plenty of food scandals recently. Glass in baby food and breakfast cereal, horsemeat in meatballs, it's really very discouraging. Whatever happened to the days when we only had to worry about salmonella and rat hairs?
You'd think with all the modern tracking methods like QR codes and RFID chips, we'd be getting fewer of these things. But no, at every step of the way there's a human circumventing technology to make a quick buck. Beef too high-priced? Pink slime filler forbidden? Throw in a horse.
Or just dump in a batch of vegetable protein. Like "organic" meat pies in Iceland. Some inspector there decided to check them after the horsemeat scandal and he not only didn't find any horsemeat DNA, he didn't find any animal DNA at all. Just vegetable protein.
Carnivores everywhere were appalled.
It isn't just meat on the hoof we have to worry about. Seems the swimming kind is suspect as well. We all know Gorton's Fish Sticks do not occur in nature. Nor do the faux shrimp popular in many locales. But at least we're aware that such fish products are sort of like hot dogs. Rendered from some baseline fish flesh like pollock or other ugly bottom swimmers.
But we expect the prime cuts to be prime. So it was extremely disappointing recently when tests determined that 87% of the time what was represented as red snapper was not, indeed, red snapper. The world is a scary place if you can't depend on the authenticity of your red snapper.
Worse, the same study found 60% of the tuna sold in restaurants and grocery stores was not tuna. Most was, in fact, a fish called "escolar," an extremely oily fish known to cause explosive diarrhea.
"Tuna surprise" anyone?
America, ya gotta love it.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
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