The High Cost of Cheap Food: Burgers Are Made of Pink Slime

"Warning: May contain a slurry of scraps off the slaughterhouse floor, washed with ammonia." A label that appears on no burger, by USDA decree.

If you haven’t heard of it, “lean finely textured beef” is big business. As the Young Turks explain, “lean finely textured beef,” or LFTB, is made of a slurry of scraps off the slaughterhouse floor and enough ammonia to kill the bacterial nastiness with which its imbued. McDonald’s and most other fast food chains were using this mechanically extracted, nutritionally weak filler in their American “all beef” burger patties, until Jamie Oliver ignited a consumer backlash. Until this point, the food industry lobby vigorously defended the practice of secretly including "pink slime" in ground beef patties and taco fillings, and was supported by the FDA, which still does not require the ingredient to be disclosed.

Where in previous decades, American beef was consonant with luxury---the Japanese word for steak is “bifusteku”---today, our use of LFTB has spoiled the image of American beef abroad. In East Asia, signs in American fast food chains proudly proclaim, “No US beef” in their products. Meanwhile in the US, “pink slime” is unavoidable to the average, thrifty consumer. Though restaurant chains have been quick to announce when they've discontinued using LFTB, it’s still found---unlabeled---in restaurant fare and institutional food, including school lunches.

Cooking at home is no guarantee you’ll avoid “pink slime,” either, because LFTB may be sold at your grocery store, where it may constitute up to 15 percent of ground beef without being labeled as containing anything other than plain old ground beef. In agreement with Jamie Oliver, Colleen Vanderlinden at TLC Cooking says we are “literally eating garbage” when we eat this stuff. Instead of calling drive through burgers “fast food,” we should be calling it “trash food.”

Image credit: felixtriller./Flickr

The High Cost of Cheap Food: Fast Food Is Addictive

When the red pill and the blue pill are the same, choice is an illusion.

Drugs in your food. What if it only appears to be a choice?

Second in a series on "The High Cost of Cheap Food."

The effects of the fast food marketplace, in which addictive food is sold without additional regulation---where in fact it’s easier and cheaper than real, fresh food---are reflected in our mortality and morbidity statistics. In the birthplace of fast food, the leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, putting lifestyle far ahead of gun violence as a killer of Americans.

Addiction is a deadly force that alters animals' priorities so that mice will press the cocaine lever, ignoring food and water, until they die. Rats will endure electric shock for junk food. Human animals are wired much the same way; our intellect might save us, or simply provide more sophisticated forms of cognitive dissonance.

 

It’s back to school time, and adult humans with graduate degrees will begin passing out "Just Say No to Drugs" brochures to children who take prescribed amphetamines. Those same well educated adult humans will line up for their morning dose of caffeine and sugar from a big chain instead of making something fresh at home for breakfast, and fail again to see the irony in their lives, even if they caught it in the classroom. It’s why we shouldn’t razz Alanis Morissette too hard for failing to come up with actual ironies for her song; most of us couldn’t spot the ironies in our own lives, either. The response to irony in our lives is cognitive dissonance more often than it’s enlightenment and the desire to change.

For good health, “a combination of regular exercise, healthy diet, smoking avoidance, and weight maintenance” is Johns Hopkins Hospital's sensible advice that's free to take. No one would dispute that personal health is very important---even priceless. Yet the number of dollars we spend positively destroying our health---including on packaged, junk, and fast foods---is enormous; when you add in the amount wasted on products promising us health and freedom from addictions---and failing to deliver--- the combined figure is incalculable.

Our actual priorities place “what's good for us” farther down the list than we care to admit. We know what is good for us , but choose what feels good, especially when it’s easier. Fatty foods, sweets, and salty foods are what we crave, and junk and fast food deliver: full of vegetable oil, unnatural sweeteners, and excess salt that, by hitting our “bliss points” reliably, alter our biology in much the same ways that highly addictive drugs like cocaine do. A Happy Meal is My First Drug Paraphernalia.

When it comes to our food, the problem isn’t simply that we lack willpower to avoid addictive and unhealthy foods; it’s that the system is designed around a particular lifestyle: one in which we work long hours, shop, and go home, efficiently and in relative isolation from other people. In this system, people eat what is manufactured, and eat it quickly, on the go. The system is designed to make us more efficient workers and consumers, not happier, more self-actualized human beings.

All the packaged foods you see advertised are designed to be addictive. The mission of any fast food restaurant is to make theirs your favorite. This can be achieved best, in a zero sum game of “stomach share” in the marketplace, by making you consume far more than you need---even designing foods that make you feel hungrier than when you sat down to eat them. “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing,” says Yale University professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell. Even worse than these advances in junk food technology: the changes that they make to our bodies may be passed down to the next generation.

Coming next in this series: Fast food is made of petroleum.

The High Cost of Cheap Food

"The High Cost of Cheap Food" is a new series on the hidden costs of feeding a nation---and increasingly, the world---on an unsustainable slurry of scraps and toxins.

1. A fast food diet is an unhealthy diet.

Fast food is not a healthy food choice, to say the very least. As long as we buy our food, cash, and only pay for our health care indirectly, if at all, we will continue to believe that value meals are a bargain and health care is expensive. People buy food on impulse, often when we’re hungry, from companies that indulge our tastes for salt, sugar, and fat. If people shopped for their food as carefully as they do for insurance, or even if the health of our food were as well regulated as insurance, we would all eat better.

For nearly all of us, nearly all of the time, Big Food decides what we eat. They control the market, so that even though it looks like a lot of individuals expressing their freedom to choose, in reality there are not enough differences among the choices, and high quality foods are available in far fewer places. The fast food industry sells us an abundance of food made from cheap, refined, low quality ingredients, like “pink slime” and Coca-Cola, foods that are proven killers. This irregularity of regulation in a country that licenses drivers, pet owners, and hair stylists, is explained by the “Amazing Revolving Door” among industries and the agencies that regulate them.

Fast food does not nourish, because it’s designed to be made from a minimal number of the cheapest ingredients available, by people who’ve received very little training---the better to afford the massive turnover of the fast food industry, which pays a starvation wage to its employees. And neither the government nor the marketplace forces corporations to do a better job of feeding the country.

We as consumers are not the end of the line. Everything works in circles---cycles that provide feedback at every step. The marketplace currently prioritizes cheap food over nourishment, quick meals over Slow Food. The entire model for fast food is unhealthy at every level, and getting worse. The good news is that by demanding freshness, diversity, transparency, and justice from the food systems that serve us, the benefits of healthy eating become not just personal, but social. Making better food choices improves the health of the workers, animals, and ecosystems that nourish us, by creating demand in the marketplace for products that are sustainably raised and harvested, and fairly traded.


Next week: The Leading Causes of Death

Image credit: Νick P/Flickr

What is food?

Let me ask you: does this look like food to you?

Michael Pollan says to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Yet some non-foods fill the shelves of “health” emporiums and websites. Sites, books, and articles that purport to be about and for good health can’t even get the “food” part of Pollan’s advice right. How do they screw it up so bad?

What is food, anyway? Food isn’t just whatever you can swallow that won’t kill you on the spot. Food is a biological necessity and for humans, it’s a cultural necessity, as well. Everybody eats. And before the advent of industrial “food,” everybody ate food. It was as easy as that. Now, we have to trace our food back to its origins to be sure it is 100% food.

Food is necessary to life, and food is made from living matter. Pollan says to eat “mostly plants.” Besides plants, there are fungi and animals we can eat. The other substances we must ingest regularly to survive are water, sodium chloride (sea salt), and sunshine (or vitamin D). Everything we need to live can come from a diet of living things in our environment: this is what we have always eaten, for more than a million years.

Today’s industrial diet includes multivitamins, energy drinks, and countless foods containing chemical flavors, colors, and preservatives. The very plants and animals in these foods may be genetically modified organisms, or raised on them. Corn, soy, and other animal feeds are among the most common GMOs on the market, and GM salmon is being considered for approval for the US market. Some foods are irradiated, including fresh meat, seafood, eggs, and produce, sprouting seeds, and spices. The US government does not require labeling for GMOs. It does require labeling for irradiated food; the US label for irradiated food is called a “Radura symbol,” and looks like this:

Radura: see "Healthwashing", "Greenwashing"

Vitamin pills include synthetic versions of naturally occurring elements, that are not identical to the natural forms: they are isomer, or mirror images, of the naturally occurring versions. Close, but not so close that the body does not treat them differently, or that they do not have a negative effect on the body when they are incorporated as if they were the real thing. Doctors selling expensive vitamin supplements will happily explain some of the toxic synthetics that they do not use in their pills. Naturally Occurring Standards for vitamins are being proposed by the Organic Consumers Organization.

But supplements aren’t just in pills: this post from The Healthy Home Economist contains info on the dangers of cheap synthetic vitamins added to nut milks. Check for yourself to see if your fortified breakfast cereals, energy bars and drinks, and dietary supplements use these toxic versions of nutrients. Niacin, riboflavin, ascorbic acid, and other common nutrients are synthetic, and not identical to their naturally occurring counterparts.

Activists have been increasingly noting how industrial food and the pharmaceutical industry are becoming less distinct from one another. Carlos Monteiros, writing for the World Public Health Nutrition Association website on industrial food that makes health claims, notes: “In 2010 Tang delivered 20 billion servings in 90 countries. It is very profitable, at 37 per cent, the kind of return usually associated with successful pharmaceuticals.”

With one hand, Kraft Foods and other giant food manufacturers sell us “health foods” like Tang that are secretly toxic, and with another hand that is twice as large, Kraft sells us snack foods that we know are bad for us, but we eat anyway. We think we’re being good when we drink our Tang (or Red Bull, or Slim Fast, or Vitamin Water), but we’re actually drinking poisonous chemical slurries to wash down the rancid, genetically modified, refined products we call “fast food” or snacks. None of this is food, and it’s not simply unhealthy: it’s killing us.

What are the health risks of eating such a diet? Cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes... the big killers are industrial foods. And who stands to benefit when the majority of people have nothing else to eat but food that causes disease? Other than food manufacturers, it’s pharmaceutical companies who stand to profit from our misery. Which brings us to another category of non-food: antibiotics.

The word “antibiotic” means “against life.” Antibiotics kill other living things. We use them medicinally to kill bacteria that cause disease. But when they’re used broadly, they breed resistance into the organisms that harm us. Despite the long term implications, farmers continue to use broad spectrum antibiotics and give them routinely to all their livestock, whether they’re healthy or sick, to prevent illness and increase the size of their animals. A short term side effect of antibiotic use in this fashion is that it makes the animals bigger when they don’t devote any resources to fighting infection. The same appears to be true of plants that are routinely sprayed with pesticides. Though we have won regulation for organically raised plants, the USDA has given up on restricting antibiotic use in livestock, leaving it up to the consumer to seek out meat, fish, and dairy that haven’t been fed antibiotics.

Food is made from living things. To be healthy, eat a life based diet. Consider foods from the sea, dark leafy greens, fats, cultured foods, and other fresh foods that are highly nutrient dense as alternatives to your multivitamins and energy drinks, and for breakfast and snacks, the meals we most often eat from packages. Work a little for your food. Know what you’re eating. And keep looking for alternatives to the industrial diet. Maybe you don’t think you like anchovies and kale yet (Kale, Caesar!) But how could anything taste worse than Red Bull?


Image credit: stevendepolo/Flickr