Entry #9 You Are What You Eat

While driving home from a rough day at work, the thought crosses your mind that you will be too tired to prepare yourself dinner. As you are making your way through traffic your stomach begins to growl. This is when you notice just off to your right that ever so familiar yellow “M.” You decide to drop in and grab a double cheeseburger…or two, okay three! It’s not bad, could be better, but who could beat that price right?  Your stomachs now full and your wallets no worse for wear. Though, if you had heard the controversies around those burgers, would you still have eaten them?

That's not strawberry icecream! 

Not that long ago there was a huge public outrage over this stuff called “Pink Slime.” It’s basically tiny bits of otherwise unusable dirty meat that is emulsified and mixed with ammonia to sanitize it. The stuff was thought to be everywhere and lot of people stopped buying certain meats because of it. One of the claims was that

all of McDonald’s foods were made with this “Pink Slime” and that was how they made their food so cheap. It was never proven, but it did a lot of damage to the company’s reputation.

I wonder though, if the news companies that released the stories about “Pink Slime” hadn’t portrayed it as a toxic substance that could kill you, how the public would have reacted to first seeing the gooey substance. After all, we have to realize that cheap prices come at a cost right? You know like mom and dad always said, “You get what you pay for.” This stuff has been around for quite some time, I wonder why nobody got upset about it sooner. Perhaps, it’s because deep down, we know that when we eat at McD’s and pay a dollar for a burger it’s probably not good for us….would we be okay with paying a lot more for a burger made from quality meats? Well if that’s what we wanted we probably would have gone to Red Robin then…..I think in the long run “Pink Slime” in one form or another will make a comeback, after all we Americans love cheap food.