The Cellar - Sept 30, 2010: Mystery Meat

Hmmmmmmm.....

I don't know nothin' about nothin' but this seems fishy.
A quick inspection of the re-bloggers turned up this (from Nik Matt at The Earth Giant (DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if HIS facts are straight but it it seems more plausible to me)
Nik says:
"There is a lot of misinformation in this bullshit. The picture isn’t even mechanically separated chicken, it’s slurry, which exists because Americans think dark meat is nasty (yet love this shit). Basically they emulsify dark meat and separate it from the excess fat and water then flash-freeze the slurry to be transported to plants all over the country that will shape it into lovely patties and nuggets. At no point in time is this treated with ammonia (that happened to hamburger meat in response to e-coli outbreaks and doesn’t happen anymore) and no processing plant would ever put an entire fucking chicken into a sieve to be separated. There are no non-muscular parts, except for maybe a very small amount of tough tissue, in any mechanically separated meat or slurry."

I Googled "Chicken Slurry" and it doesn't look anything like the bubblegum in this picture. Wikipedia wasn't a whole lot more helpful.

I'd really really like to know the source of this picture. Fooducate.com says this about the picture:

"Folks, this is mechanically separated chicken, an invention of the late 20th century. Someone figured out in the 1960’s that meat processors can eek out a few more percent of profit from chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows by scraping the bones 100% clean of meat. This is done by machines, not humans, by passing bones leftover after the initial cutting through a high pressure sieve. The paste you see in the picture above is the result.

This paste goes on to become the main ingredient in many a hot dog, bologna, chicken nuggets, pepperoni, salami, jerky etc…"

And a contributer on Snopes says:
"The article isn't wholly accurate, because MRM (Mechanically Reclaimed Meat) comes from what is left on the carcass after other processing. It's not a case of mincing the whole carcass (only a certain proportion of bones are allowed - depends on your local food laws). What tends to squick people is the idea of non-muscle meat, skin and cartilage in the mix. The description sounds more like steam reclaimed meat from a rendering plant - the whole carcass goes into the process, is pressure cooked and the resulting "highly pigmented slurry" is dried to varying degrees depending on whether you want to make it into slices for sandwiches, into pet food or dried completely for fertiliser.

References:
Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal Is Doing to the World by Eric Schlosser
The Food Scandal: What's Wrong with the British Diet and How to Set It Right by Caroline Walker and Geoffrey Cannon
Meat Machine by Jan W"

I think if that picture is really MRM, it is POST-pigmenting. It is made from cleaned carcasses.
Facts may be gross, but I like to get 'em straight.
Or, straighter.