Poll: "Ingredients in a Chicken McNugget" or "You Want me to Eat What Now?"

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I gave up on Mcdonald's when I realized I got sick every time I ate it. Knowing that stuff is in it now doesn't surprise me much.

Also your poll is broken.

 

[CRoone]

You asked:

"Do the benefits of convenience and a cost that is cheap at the register really outweigh the actual toll that the industrial food system has taken on us?"

I answer (from my own personal point of view):
To a certain extent.
No, it's not healthy, and yes, one could even call the production of such food 'morally reprehensible', but really, most people don't care, and are probably better off that way. Not to sound like a morbid troll, but...we're all going to die of something someday. Heart attack, old age, getting hit by a stray bus, it doesn't matter. In the end, we're all going to find ourselves laid out on the slab at some point. I figure that the food manufacturers aren't malevolent and trying to kill us for s**ts and giggles; at worst, they're just the same bunch of tired, overworked, underpaid, disaffected desk jockeys that most of us can relate to, and at worst, they and their companies are just trying to cut costs a little more so that they all can take home a few more cents in their paychecks that week, and nothing more.

Besides, the sodium in all of the Soda, Energy Drinks, and Instant Ramen I've ever eaten will probably come back to destroy my kidneys somewhere down the line, but for where I'm at right now - 19 years old, making less than $70 every two weeks because it's the highest paying job I could find with my qualifications this season - I'll take the low prices over being healthy. If kidney failure doesn't kill me, a Heart Attack probably will. Or, if I'm lucky, I'll go out by being hit by a stray bus; at least my death would make the news. Either way, though, I know that someday, I'll be laid out on the slab, and it won't matter what put me there.
Therefore, I can pick Quantity and Convenience over Quality with relative peace of mind, because Quality costs too much, and I need to save every dollar I can to get those new tires before Winter. I figure a Heart Attack would take longer to kill me than a car accident from spinning out into the path of a semi truck due to a patch of black ice would, anyway.

 

[Alucard832]

If you're eating enough chicken nuggets for those things to affect you, you've got a different thing to worry about.

 

[x EvilErmine x]

I hate to break it to you, OP, but a lot of things are deadly if you eat too much. So 5 grams kills? Whatever. Next you'll be asking us to ban salt.

No joke.
That's like when people say that margarine is 1 molecule away form plastic. As if that even makes sense! Wouldn't water be 1 molecule away from just 2 parts hydrogen?

Seriously, scare tactics and sensationalism like this always make me laugh.

I'll avoid anything that causes damage to reproduction.

2 parts hydrogen? Do you mean two parts oxygen? Edit: No he was right in the first place, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen make up water, although it should read 'Wouldn't water be 1 atom away from just 2 parts hydrogen?' the word atom and molecule are sadly not interchangeable, they mean different things entirely

That's why I said 'lowest tier' .

I love it when stuck of rich guys waltz over to take a shit where I eat.

Yeah, your type, love to bash McDonalds, probably because you're well off enough to eat at some swanky restaurant most days. Well the NHS doesn't pay very well.

A meal costs £5.40 in Burger King and I have to pay for BBQ sauce. Same size meal costs £3.79 in MD and I get WiFi and BBQ sauce for free. That's 45% more at BK, for what?

I know this is just my personal experience but I went into burger king once and a rat, A FUCKING RAT ran past me and out the door. I know that's an isolated incident but seriously, what the fuck?!?! How did it get there, why was the staff so surprised when told them I saw a rat? Had they not even seen it?

Also. Egg McMuffin. Seriously. How the fuck is that "lowest tier" and they're open at 6am. Good pancakes too. You know a restaurant on the highstreet that does better than that!?!?

They're coffee is bitter crap but otherwise they are God Tier.

I know what it is. Nah, I've figured it out. It's the price, so cheap certain types get suspicious when you're not spending more than £6 for a meal. Well that's "sound" logic expense = quality[/sarc]. (Console games cost about 35-50% more than PC games)

Well i see where you are coming from but I'm not posh and i certainly am not rich. Just to let you know that if you get one meal a day for the standard working week (Mon-Fri) from McDonald's then you are spending £18.95 on fast food add an extra £1.05 and you've got £20.00. Take into consideration that if you went to Asda with that and did some shopping then you would be surprised at the things you could get. Most certainly you could get enough, and with some to spare, for you to make a lunch your self that would be considerably better for you. So for me it's got nothing to do with the price being low, in fact i think that the price is very high for what you get. The most i would pay for one of there meals would be no more than £2.00.

ASDA!?!? I know they've got good value food but do you honestly expect me to get up 30 minutes to an hour earlier to heat up the grill and veg oil to cook burger and fries, then somehow keep them warm for 7-8 hours and carry this around with me for the rest of the day?!? I already have to get up at 5:30am for a 2 hour commute to work and first thing in the mornign I struggle to make coffee.

And it doesn't get round the fact that I can have whatever happens to take my fancy when I arrive at McDonalds, not what I happened to cook that morning, with comfortable place to sit with wifi access (youtube on my ipod/PSP).

My TIME is valuable and has to be factored beyond the mere ingredients, also the techniques of production at McDonalds and the economy of scale cannot be applied with home cooking. I simply cannot cook a burger and fries as well as mcdonalds can.

I think £19 for a week's worth of hot lunches is incredibly good value and money well spent.

Point taken, though I'd like to add that there are more foods out there than burger an chips which is what you seem to be basing your argument on and you could always make it the night before if you haven't got time in the morning, that's what i do.

 

[Treblaine]

Just to get this clear, you're saying that disliking the food at McDonalds implies some sort of bourgeoisie contempt for the lower "classes"?

Yep.

You said: "(would rather have) something that probably wasn't cooked by a greasy, moody, dick getting paid minimum wage"

In fairness you haven't indicated that prejudice towards fellow customers but you haven't given any real reason for your prejudice against McDonalds. It's certainly a good theory that you don't seem to want to actually refute, just repeat it back to me almost baffled for me even daring to suggest it.

I suppose you could be some sort of closet trotskyite with a deep illogical hatred of successful commercialism, and what is a bigger and more clichéd target than McDonalds? Certainly see it a lot in uni, dyed in the wool socialists hate McDonalds to spite how socially beneficial they actually are.

It's just become easy to hate McDonalds, a popular culture scape goat, it's really pathetic how many people jump on this bandwagon out of ignorance and sheep-like dependency for consensus of disgust. There is no intelligent or reasoned dialogue here, just rumour and "impressions" the sense of fraternity with shared disgust and indignation. People have made their conclusions and work back from there with their "rationalisation".

But it doesn't matter which you are, throughout history everyone had a different reason for hating the popular scape goat, their reasons as different from each other as they are trivial or false. People just need to hate something.

And I don't like that.

I'm very critical and thoughtful about popular hatred, disgust and conspiratorial thinking. I always consider and argue the counter position.

 

[thiosk]

Many of my science-inclined colleagues here on the escapist have posted a few things with regards to the retardedness of the originally posted scaremongering bullcrap.

Two things in particular stuck out to me:

dimethylopolysiloxene (which, according to the Handbook of Food Additives, is a suspected carcinogen, as well as a confirmed mutagen, tomorigen, and reproductive effector, it is also flammable)

As pointed out some pages ago, its dimethyl polysiloxANE. Silicone rubber. In other words, BOOBS. Yes, fake boobs, it was discontinued because of health fears and replaced with saline, but those restrictions are being generally lifted, as theres more evidence that silicone PREVENTS cancer, rather than causes it. Check the wikipedia article. Also, sugar and flour are significantly more flammable than siloxanes. That is a silly claim, I use this material in my lab all the time for many reasons.

This is all minor, i can live with people not understanding it. But the following is just plain obnoxious:

and tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) [which, according to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, is a form of butane (lighter fluid) that the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in food: it may comprise no more than 0.02% of the oil in a nugget.

BUTANE LIGHTER FLUID

Yeah. Not made of butane. Not even remotely a "form of butane." At all. See the little cross sign part on the bottom? that represents 4 carbon atoms, connected to the ring and the center one. That is a "tert-butyl" group, with butyl meaning "4" and tert- meaning 'tertiary' So the scaremongerers read "butyl" and said "OMG ITS BUTANE BUTANE IS LIGHTERFLUID OMG."

General rule for everyone: if you don't understand basic organic chemistry, don't freak out over the names of these things. They only sound scary because you have no idea what the syllables mean.

Pro Tip: Vitamin D is actually (5Z,7E,22E)-(3S)-9,10-seco-5,7,10(19),22-ergostatetraen-3-ol

 

[Ferricyanide]

tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) [which, according to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, is a form of butane (lighter fluid)

...What?

There's two forms of butane: butane (also called n-butane) and methylpropane (also called i-butane). I'm not an organic chemist but this TBHQ stuff looks like a phenol. I don't know the exact mechanism but it just looks like a tert-butyl group was substituted on one of the spots on the aromatic ring. Maybe TBHQ is derived from butane and hydroquinone, but the idea that it's a form of butane... doesn't make sense. There's no oxygen in butane, for sure.

This means one of two things: A) Either the author intentionally put the lighter fluid part in there to scare you, in which case he's a fraud, or B) he simply doesn't understand how chemistry works, and it seems like maybe you shouldn't take advice on this stuff from someone who doesn't understand O-Chem?

That's like when people say that margarine is 1 molecule away form plastic. As if that even makes sense! Wouldn't water be 1 molecule away from just 2 parts hydrogen?

It would be one atom away from two hydrogens. Almost every substance on the planet is one molecule away from being another substance, since almost everything is made of molecules. It's like saying a word is one word away from being another word. It's a tautology.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

Could I ask if you had read the significant edit that I made to my original post?

I have now read your edit, and I still make no change to my position. There's still insufficient factual evidence presented to indicate the cost of changing the system is warranted. Additionally, with the continued crowing over useless, biased, and potentially tampered-with information (see the link in this post by Krion_Vark earlier in this thread for more examples of this), the signal-to-noise ratio is heavily weighted to the 'noise' side. Perhaps it's just me, but public policy should not be built through generating uninformed outrage or fear.

We have agencies, usually publicly-funded (i.e. government), whose purpose is to oversee, on behalf of the citizens so as to save them time to do other things, studies on additives (natural or otherwise) that enter the lives of citizens through various means, food being one of them. Studies have ALREADY been carried out on the things currently added to processed food. If you're pushing for 'more studies are needed', then I have no issue with that, though at some point it needs to be determined when enough studies have been done, lest we do nothing but revisit the past and waste time, money, and effort to no future gain.

Given it's highly likely there's a significant, non-zero resource (energy, time, money, trained personnel, etc) overhead to conducting these studies, what priority do we give to repeating prior studies if we operate under a system where these resources are limited?

 

[Arachon]

Yep.

You said: "(would rather have) something that probably wasn't cooked by a greasy, moody, dick getting paid minimum wage"

In fairness you haven't indicated that prejudice towards fellow customers but you haven't given any real reason for your prejudice against McDonalds. It's certainly a good theory that you don't seem to want to actually refute, just repeat it back to me almost baffled for me even daring to suggest it.

I suppose you could be some sort of closet trotskyite with a deep illogical hatred of successful commercialism, and what is a bigger and more clichéd target than McDonalds? Certainly see it a lot in uni, dyed in the wool socialists hate McDonalds to spite how socially beneficial they actually are.

It's just become easy to hate McDonalds, a popular culture scape goat, it's really pathetic how many people jump on this bandwagon out of ignorance and sheep-like dependency for consensus of disgust. There is no intelligent or reasoned dialogue here, just rumour and "impressions" the sense of fraternity with shared disgust and indignation. People have made their conclusions and work back from there with their "rationalisation".

But it doesn't matter which you are, throughout history everyone had a different reason for hating the popular scape goat, their reasons as different from each other as they are trivial or false. People just need to hate something.

And I don't like that.

I'm very critical and thoughtful about popular hatred, disgust and conspiratorial thinking. I always consider and argue the counter position.

Quite frankly, I haven't said anything earlier in this thread, you must mistake me for someone else.

And about the McD hate... What can I say, I have a friend who works there, they're forced to work horrible hours, under extreme stress, at crappy pay. Not only that, but the chain keeps breaking working conditions and health-related laws, yet are never held accountable, due to their massive army of lawyers cleaning up after them.

And on a further note, their food tastes like shit, and costs way too much for that quality, which is the #1 reason why I don't eat there.

 

[Vredesbyrd67]

I'm a smoker, which means I regularly take in carbon monoxide, tar, rocket fuel, rat poison, ammonia, arsenic, and DDT about three to seven times a day. I also eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly. I weigh about 167 pounds and can run four miles at a steady pace without stopping. My doctor recently told me I'm in the best shape of my life.

My point is, chicken nuggets aren't the worst you can do. Even if they are, as long as you take care of yourself and know what you're ingesting, you can stand to eat a few McNuggs every now and again and not die of cardiac arrest.

 

[crudus]

... So now, if I may, let me pose a question. What the hell is wrong with us? Why would anyone eat this? Why would anyone think that it qualifies, even remotely, as food? Considering that statistics say that one in three American children eat fast food every day, shouldn't we be asking ourselves some serious questions like "why is it even legal to serve that to people, nonetheless to children, and on a regular basis?"

The real question that I'm asking here is, do the benefits of convenience and a cost that is cheap at the register really outweigh the actual toll that the industrial food system has taken on us?

1. Many things are wrong with us. It is hard to tell what the leading cause is. My guess is we have a circuit in our heads that says "less work, more food, more fucking". Evolution should have us working the least for the most amount of food. It makes sense if you imagine a world where food is more scarce.

2. I think this falls under the category of "because they are tasty". We really aren't build to consider the long term ramifications of anything before we do it.

3. What makes something not qualify is food? I say if we can digest it without dying, it is food.

4. Is it the same children eating fast food daily or is it "take 3 kids and alternate which one has fast food"? Regardless, here is a better question: why do parents allow their children to eat it? You seem to be blaming the food company for something the parents themselves should be stopping. It is common knowledge that constant fast food isn't healthy. The absolute farthest you can take this is "is it negligence to let your kid eat only fast food?".

5. Again, the food industry has nothing at fault here. We go there and eat the food willingly. As long as people don't drop dead a few hours after eating the food, then any adverse effects are on the people.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

And we vegans win again.

This adds to the discussion how? Need I remind you of the Posting Guidelines? In particular, there's a section titled "Replying to a topic" that you may want to review. Afterwards, please expand upon your position.

 

[Drop_D-Bombshell]

I'll eat it if i'm hungry. I haven't died yet from this food so it doesn't bother. I'm more partial to burger king (suprisingly we don't hear much about their food).

Also 0.02%? That's not that scary if 1% cause those minor problems. I would understand if it was 0.6% or something, but 0.02% is so insignificant.

 

[Treblaine]

Point taken, though I'd like to add that there are more foods out there than burger an chips which is what you seem to be basing your argument on and you could always make it the night before if you haven't got time in the morning, that's what i do.

Maybe not burger and chips. Fresh salad, toasted sandwich, Wrap, Tortilla, same difference on price for those. Also I don't have fries every day but I didn't want to unfairly exclude that from the comparison. Basically a hot lunch, quick and cheap.

If we are talking cold sandwiches well that's a bit of a different comparison. I don't have access to a sandwich toaster for lunch where I work.

You do realise that the meat that McDonalds serves is deliberatly the worst cuts, right? They're 'low tier' because they serve low quality goods. You may like their food, but that doesn't magicaly change the quality of the meat being served.

Err, what do you think ALL BURGERS are made from? Only the swankiest fanciest restaurants are going to take the finest tenderest cuts of beef then ground it up into mince, it's an utter waste. Hell no, use the whole animal, steak cuts for steak, burger cuts appropriately. What else is there too it? The nutritional quality of a cut of beef isn't going to change much of nutritional value.

McDonalds have done on the record that they use only 100% beef for their patties, that EXCLUDES cartilage, ground bone, tripe or any other parts, just the muscle of the cow. No bulk like wheat or water gloop. If they lied then they're in for some hefty fines from trading standards.

Sheesh, you seem to think more expensive cuts automatically equals better quality. Not very relevant once minced and put in a burger.

Fact: If it tastes good, then it tastes good, what else is there to it? Is "goodness" beyond my mere senses but also comes from the snobby satisfaction of thinking you are getting te very finest pieces of the animal. So McDonalds are shit-tier because they don't offer the ABSOLUTE BEST at the lowest price? Come on.

I've been to too many pubs and places like wetherspoons served hard, dry and tasteless burgers that seem somehow immune to popular criticism to spite charging far more. Maybe it's because they charge more, somehow that makes it immune to bad impressions unless it is absolutely foul.

I am fed up to the back teeth of how ignorant and snooty people are about this. This popular hatred of mcdonalds has gotten to a ridiculous level, it has gone beyond logic or reason. I avoided McDonalds for years buying people bullshit about them till I bothered to actually look beyond the superficial claims and unsubstantiated rumours.

 

[Canid117]

So THATS why you can buy 50 of them for ten bucks.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

And we vegans win again.

This adds to the discussion how? Need I remind you of the Posting Guidelines? In particular, there's a section titled "Replying to a topic" that you may want to review. Afterwards, please expand upon your position.

The topic is about processed meat products.

Being vegan and avoiding such things seems like a positive outcome.

No need to expand upon my original post.

The topic is processed food and synthetic additives, with the Chicken McNugget as an example. Are you asserting that all meatless products are free from the additives issue?