What's in the Meat?

What's in the Meat?

  • Submitted By: Lunaelsa
  • Date Submitted: 11/07/2010 3:17 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1459
  • Page: 6
  • Views: 378

Lina Elsayed
Whats in the meat?

Is what you are consuming on a daily basis food or poison? What kind of meats are you eating or feeding to your loved ones? Most people don’t want to know the truth about what they are swallowing when they eat the meat from supermarkets, restaurants, schools and many other places. If they only tried to learn and see what they are putting into their bodies by eating these prepared meats, I can say with no hyperbole that they would think twice about ever eating it again. The meat that is consumed today is dangerous for many reasons including improper preparation at the restaurants, improper animal behavior, and chemically intensified processed food. How many of us really want to see the truth about how processed meats are made? Eric Schlosser provides a great analysis and insight on this expanding epidemic in his book Fast Food Nation.
Although many people may not be aware of it, the enormous meat producing industry has grown around the process of shipping this questionable meat. Naturally meat is putrid gray color once it has been out for long enough. To combat this effect the industry places a color fixing chemical in it to make it as read as you see it in stores. This color changing chemical also doubles as a preserver. The main reason however is purely aesthetic. Americans want quick, cheap, convenient food and are willing to go out and purchase meat that may have been on the supermarket shelf for three if not four weeks. If the meat was the natural gray, then most people would simply not purchase it due to being conditioned to expecting a red color. The chemical used is called sodium nitrite, which belongs to a class of compounds known as Nitrosamines. It is a known carcinogen which has been confirmed over the course of lab rat studies. During the 1970s this chemical was even under fire from the USDA which tried banning it unsuccessfully due to the interference of food industry lobbyists. Scanlan, Richard. "Nitrosamines...

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