Shown above is the following: Vienna Sausages, Bologna, Hot Dogs, Potted Meat, Miscellaneous Sausage, Spam, Salisbury Steak, Hamburger Meat ground from the mystery tubes, and the Chicken Nuggets from McDonald's. What a combo! Ha-ha!
Anyway, when it comes to picking your poison, some of you may be like "I never eat any of that crap!" If so, good for you, but some of these can actually be good. For example, fresh ground beef can make excellent burgers if it comes from identifiable beef trimmings. Some of the "tube meat" that comes in premixed is debatable. I used to work as a butcher many years ago, and I've seen a huge difference between the two albeit they sell under the same name.
Now, moving right along into McDonald's mystery nuggets... Not all chicken nuggets are created equal! McDonald's has a really bad reputation for the fillers and crazy ingredients they use in their nuggets. However, you can easily find some real chicken nuggets that are actually made from 100% chicken and breading, but it's best to make your own, just as you'd deep fry your own chicken strips, etc.
Going back up to the top, what in the hell is in Vienna Sausages? I've seen these come out of the can in multiple colors before, and I try to stay away from this bizarre "meat." Bologna and Hot Dogs are usually a bunch of mechanically separated beef, chicken, pork, and turkey, but they vary from brand to brand. I like the all-beef versions, but I try to limit my consumption of this tasty garbage, oops, I mean mystery meat. Back in the day, going by what I've heard, hot dogs used to be made with much higher quality. What happened? Okay, well, the last hot dog I ate that tasted like real meat was an Angus Beef one.
Potted meat is something that I've only ate a few times in my entire life. I'm just not a fan of eating stomachs/tripe and minced mystery meat from a nasty little can. Miscellaneous sausage and regular sage/seasoned sausage is sort of like hamburger meat. I've made real sausage before from actual pork trimmings and identifiable seasonings, and it was wonderful. However, some of the miscellaneous sausage is suspect for the mystery meat department, to say the least.
Spam is also debatable. Some folks consider it to be composed of mystery products while others say it is mostly pork shoulder meat, fat and salt. Uh, it looks sort of mysterious, so I'll leave it at that albeit some people treat it as a delicacy for some weird reason; yikes!
The other one shown here is Salisbury Steak. You will often find this one in frozen food dinners. I must admit, I actually think Salisbury steaks taste pretty good, but when I read the ingredients, I'm like "holy cow!" Just what all is in this piece of meat? Why are there so many strange ingredients listed and so many mechanically separated animals in there? It must be all the onion seasoning and breading within a Salisbury steak that makes it so good? I would really like to know what percentage of this is not fillers and is actually meat of some type? I'm going to guess at least 50%, right???
At any mysterious meat-eating rate, if you had to pick your poison from this list, which one is your favorite? I hope I haven't converted too many people to vegetarianism after reading this post; ha!
Image Credits: The images I used were in the Public Domain and from Wikimedia Commons.
---End of Post "Mystery Meat: Pick Your Poison!"
No comments:
Post a Comment