Know What's In Your Food

Jamie Oliver has been one of my favorite celebrity chefs for years. I love the way he cooks, and the way he has used his celebrity to improve school lunches around the world, among other things. One of his on going battles has been with the fast food industry, who use as much as 70% fillers in their "hamburger" meat. It's a stretch to call it hamburger, and after the video I saw today, I realize how important it is to know what's in your food and where it came from.

Jamie has worked tirelessly to demonstrate to parents and children exactly where their food comes from. He brings a cow to the demonstration, and draws in white chalk on the cow's hide to show the cost of the various cuts of meat. This is interesting to the crowd, as most people don't know what part of the cow is used. He draws all over the cow, and then announces that the hamburger meat for many fast food items comes from the leftovers: the fat, the sinew, the trimmings, the gristle with bits of meat attached. Jamie calls this "pink slime." In order to process this glob, it is spun in a centrifuge to break up the sinew. It is then "washed" with a mixture of ammonia and water, then drained. As much as 15% of a fast food burger might contain this mixture. That is the amount that the USDA will allow. By the way, ammonia is NOT listed as an ingredient in this mixture.

Burger King and Taco Bell stopped using this mixture in their meat awhile ago. McDonald's has finally stopped doing this too, thanks to the pressure of Jamie Oliver and his relentless pursuit of knowing what you are eating. The pink slime mixture stuff the butcher would typically throw away, but corporations discovered that using the leftovers would vastly reduce the cost of their burgers. Interestingly, McDonald's in the UK, Ireland and Latin America do not use the pink slime filler. They buy their beef from locally sourced farms, and use real beef in their burgers.

Progress in food education is slow. We need more advocates like Jamie that are willing to push for full disclosure so that the public knows exactly what it is getting. We also need more parents to get serious about what their children eat. We are raising a generation of overweight kids who will be sick with life threatening diseases like diabetes long before they should. Remember the documentary by Morgan Spurlock called "Fast Food Nation?" Morgan ate nothing but McDonald's for a month, and it nearly killed him. Let's all make an effort to know where our food comes from and what's in it.