Meaty sweeties

On May 14 2007 · 2 Comments · In Diary

Mars, Twix, Snickers, Maltesers, Bounty, Minstrels and Milky Way now contain rennet, a substance which is extracted from the stomach lining of calves, after they have been deep frozen, ground up, and treated with acid. It’s a by-product of veal production.

Lots of jelly sweets, trifles and, duh, jelly, contain gelatin. Gelatin is produced using pork skins, pork and cattle bones, or split cattle hides.

Children eat sweets, vegetarians eat sweets, we all eat them, but isn’t it weird that you can’t taste the meatiness?

Chicken drummers and turkey twizzlers bear little or no physical resemblance to the animals they came from. Sirloin steaks, bacon, sausages and burgers are all three steps removed from the animals they came from by processing and packaging.

I’d like to introduce a new rule, to help people make a better informed decision about what they eat. I’d like to make it obligatory to show people the entire production process for meat and meat by-products, including how the animals are raised, slaughtered, processed and prepared. I’d like to make it impossible for someone to buy packaged meat, a meat sandwich, even a Mars Bar, without having a full understanding of what went into it.

I eat meat, and I’m not saying anyone should stop, but maybe if people ate less, shopped more conscientiously, just gave a flying fuck where their food came from, less meat might need to be produced. It’s not just about cute calves. The meat production industry is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions on Earth.

Meet your meat.

Tags: mars, rennet, meat

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Liz

I watched “Kill it, Cook it, Eat it” on BBCThree a couple of months ago. An interesting experience – so many of the participants had no idea where meat came from apart from in nice plastic packs from the supermarket.

I didn’t expect it to have much effect on me as I was brought up at a time when half an animal hanging from a hook in the butcher’s was normal, my Dad regularly killed a chicken or rabbit from the allotment for dinner, and the Christmas turkey was live when we bought it and dead when we took it home. However, bearing in mind the animals on the programme were taken to a fairly local slaughter-house in small numbers, to be killed ( probably the “nicest” way they could go) many of the humans watching were quite shocked. I was surprised that men in their 40s and 50s couldn’t watch the process and felt unable to eat the meat.

I felt more upset that the pigs were from an intensive farm and had been subject to farrowing -crates, which was a bit of a shocker as all the others seemed to be living very free-range lives.
http://www.spikydog.com/ Nathan

I’m sorry I missed it – it does seem strange that people are willing to put stuff in their mouths without wanting to know exactly what was involved in preparing it. It’s so difficult to avoid eating food containing meat, meat by-products or other animal products, and you may well enjoy them, but the least you can do is be informed!