Eat more chikin

Sorry it's been awhile. School's gotten a bit crazy. And unfortunately that means I haven't really been devoting nearly enough time to knowing where my food came from. But I have had some great conversations about food, have biked to some great breweries, and even started brewing a batch of beer (thanks to Campbell!).

No time to give a worthy update on all of that now, but it will come, I promise.

In the mean time, here's a great visual in regards to my last post about meat. Ironically enough, my roommate found it, who is perhaps the most adamantly anti-vegetarian person I know (not that he doesn't like vegetarians, he just loves meat. And until he found this, Chick-fil-a):



What you're seeing here is not a peppermint milkshake (delicious). It's mechanically separated chicken (disgusting).

From what I can gather, the way we get from this:



to the pink paste you see above is by plucking the feathers and inserting everything that's left (bones, skin, organs, beak and all) into a gigantic press, which comes out looking like the solidified Pepto-bismol.

Unfortunately, it's not safe to eat at this point, so they have to soak it in ammonia for awhile. Now, as you can imagine, people aren't going to buy a chicken nugget that tastes like ammonia, so they have to re-flavor the putrid pink paste artificially.

But as great as it is for alliteration, chicken that's the color of cat puke just isn't all that appealing to the average consumer. To finally make it appetizing(?!?!?), they add artificial dyes to remove the pinkish tint.

Hope you enjoy your next six piece happy meal. I'd just hope they didn't mix up the bags of chicken and strawberry shake.