Fast Food Nastiness

[GoldenBrain]

I guess the choice cuts would be anything labeled correctly and not lips and arseholes.

I might try a horse tenderloin as long as I knew what it was.

[Syn7]

Farming/homesteading is definitely a fun and very peaceful lifestyle. It's hard work but extremely rewarding.

In all seriousness I'm pretty sure I'd get mauled to death if I actually jumped on a deer with my knife, so thanks for bringing me back down to reality Syn. I'd totally be down with using a spear or maybe even an atlatl though.

Deer can fuck you up, but that's now what I meant. I don't think you would get withing 25 feet of one in the wild, let alone get your hands on it. Maybe if you smoked out then sat in a tree and waited for however long it took, but I doubt it. I guess you could set up obstacles and run it into some corner and fight it, but I wouldn't if I were you. Even the ones in my backyard, that I see daily, won't let me get closer than 10 feet and I have put in the work and am very patient.


My father stalks them for kicks. A few weeks ago he got pretty close, bout 10 feet and it ran at a thick tree line, freaked out and ran back towards him. Lucky he was at the corner of the house and just stepped around the corner. And these are like wild but somewhat tame deer. Nothing like what you would come across in the real bush.

[GoldenBrain]

Deer can fuck you up, but that's now what I meant. I don't think you would get withing 25 feet of one in the wild, let alone get your hands on it. Maybe if you smoked out then sat in a tree and waited for however long it took, but I doubt it. I guess you could set up obstacles and run it into some corner and fight it, but I wouldn't if I were you. Even the ones in my backyard, that I see daily, won't let me get closer than 10 feet and I have put in the work and am very patient.


My father stalks them for kicks. A few weeks ago he got pretty close, bout 10 feet and it ran at a thick tree line, freaked out and ran back towards him. Lucky he was at the corner of the house and just stepped around the corner. And these are like wild but somewhat tame deer. Nothing like what you would come across in the real bush.

I'm glad your father is okay. Both of you sound like you'd be cool as sh!t to hang with. You make a really good point about the distance. I've stalked them in the wild as close as 20 yards or so but to get any closer would seem to be ridiculously tough. I suppose if I were really serious about this I could wear a vest made of cut up apples, take a nap in the woods and just wait it out but I'd prolly be jumped by a bear or something instead. Ah well, it was a fun thought exercise.

[GeneChing]

Figures, right?

You know, now that I think about it, I don't think I ever ate horse meat. There was a time when I would have surely tried it, back in my stunt meat eating daze in China, but I can't remember it ever being offered to me.

Europe’s Horse Meat Scandal Casts Light on Food Taboo
Horse meat is taboo in some cultures, standard in others.
Horse sausages and meat for sale in a butcher in Haarlem, Netherlands.


A butcher in the Netherlands offers a variety of horse meat options.
Photograph by Bram Budel, Hollandse Hoogte/Redux

Catherine Zuckerman
National Geographic News
Published February 12, 2013

Everyone, it seems, is talking about horse meat.

A scandal has erupted in Europe because some products labeled as beef—including Burger King hamburgers and frozen lasagna—were recently found to contain various amounts of horse meat.

Some of what was sold as beef was entirely horse meat.

With everyone from vegetarians to die-hard carnivores, the subject hits a nerve. Burger King is reported to have dropped a supplier linked to the scandal, while the frozen food company Findus has pulled its lasagnas from supermarket shelves in France and England. Frozen shepherd's pie and moussaka have also been yanked.

Even if you routinely make pig, chicken, and cow a part of your diet, there's a feeling that there's just something wrong about eating horse.

But that may only be true in certain parts of the world, like the United States and the United Kingdom, where the reports of horse meat masquerading as beef first surfaced and where horses are widely viewed as gentle companions or noble competitors. Think of the Kentucky Derby, and the many movies and books dedicated to the equine kind. It's probably safe to say that most Americans are uncomfortable with the thought of sitting down to a plate of Black Beauty or Seabiscuit. (Room for wild horses shrinks in the American West, from National Geographic.)

In plenty of other places, though, horse is regularly consumed—without any stigma attached.

Horse Meat Consumers

On the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, for example, horse is a popular local ingredient, as is its relative, the donkey. (What's the secret to Sardinian longevity?)

Among Europeans, the Sardinians aren't alone in their taste for the animal. The meat is available at some butcher shops in the Netherlands. It's eaten in France, too. And though it may not be mainstream or headlining big-ticket dining establishments, there are websites like this one, where you can buy various cuts of chevaline for grilling, roasting, and braising.

The world's biggest consumer of horse meat is China, according to estimates made by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

The Chinese dry it for sausages. The meat is especially popular in the southern region of Guangxi, where it's served as part of a dish made with rice noodles.

Number two, estimates the FAO, is Kazakhstan, where horse is an integral part of the diet and used to make various sausages and a type of dumpling called manti.

Russia, Mexico, Mongolia, Argentina, and Japan are also top consumers of horse meat.

The Meat or the Deceipt?

So what does it taste like? Food writer Waverley Root once described it as having a "lingering sweetness, which is not disagreeable but is disconcerting in meat."

The blog Eat Horse, dedicated to "promoting the human consumption of horse meat," touts the meat's healthy qualities: it's low fat, low cholesterol, and high in iron.

Los Angeles-born food historian Andrew F. Smith takes a nonjudgmental stance, perhaps surprising for an American.

"What's wrong with eating horse meat?" he asks, noting that the real problem in the European fallout is that customers were deceived.

As for whether or not horse should be consumed, he says, "We've decided certain animals are edible" and have "made certain definitions while other countries have not."

What's your definition of an edible animal? Do you think it's acceptable to eat horse? Does cultural background make a difference?

[Kellen Bassette]

To Kellen... If you want to heat a greenhouse on the cheap you can line the edges on the ground with about a foot high and a foot wide of mulch and or compost which will give off heat. Heat rises and warms the entire greenhouse. Check out this guys greenhouse where he uses the above mentioned method for supplemental heating in Wisconsin. This dude is my aquaponic idol. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks

Great video....fish farming also intrigues me. There so much right with these ideas.

[wenshu]

On an interesting side note I once bet on a horse named "Have It Your Way".

[GeneChing]

...did you win, wenshu?

[wenshu]

Obviously not since he ended up in your Whopper®.

[GeneChing]

I feel like Abbot wenshu just Costello-ed me.

[wenshu]

hiyooooooo

[GoldenBrain]

Great video....fish farming also intrigues me. There so much right with these ideas.

Thanks Kellen! Farming has been a life long dream of mine and now that I have the time and resources to pull it off I have found a sort of zen in it all. In 9 months or so when the tilapia are all grown up I may have to invite all my new Kung-Fu Magazine.com forum buddies over for a good ol fashioned fish fry.

[GoldenBrain]

Great article Gene! This story just keeps giving and giving... And the quote of the night is, "back in my stunt meat eating daze in China." I can only imagine some of the exotic foods available in China. I really need to visit there one day. It's on the bucket list fo sho.

Oh, and no offense Gene but props go to wenshu! He had you hook line and sinker. That's just what I needed to end a hard days work with a rolling guffaw.

[eltravose]

Why use horse meat when there are sooo many cows? Doesn't make sense. I heard that McDonald's meat contains rat meat. Yuck

[GeneChing]

This brings us back to Syn7's point:

From an environmental and cost perspective(as a whole) being vegetarian is cheaper. Meat producers are one of the worst polluters in the world. The amount of resources it takes to make such a small amount of meat is insane. And I mean INSANE! Beyond irresponsible and down right stupid.

February 14, 2013, 8:15 am
Horse Meat Scandal: Is the Era of Cheap Food Over?
By HARVEY MORRIS
A butcher in Central England advertising horse meat-free beef.Darren Staples/Reuters A butcher in Central England advertising horse meat-free beef.



LONDON — With Europe’s expanding horse meat scandal escalating from a drama to a crisis, consumers are being warned that the era of cheap food may be over.

In less than a month, the scandal has spread from Ireland, where prepared foods sold as beef products were found to contain horse, to Britain and much of the Continent.

The crisis deepened on Thursday when British officials said tests showed that a powerful equine drug, potentially harmful to human health, may have entered the food chain, my colleague Stephen Castle writes.

As European officials called on Europol, the European police agency, to coordinate investigations into what could turn out to be extensive Continent-wide fraud by criminal gangs, supermarkets in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands became the latest to remove suspect products from their shelves.

Some are already blaming a low-cost food culture for a situation that may have allowed criminals to exploit ever longer and more complex food supply chains to dump cheap horse meat into the market.

The potential illicit profits could be huge. France’s Nouvel Observateur, tracing the possible itinerary of a horse meat lasagne, said that the route from a Romanian abattoir to a French or British supermarket shelf passed through numerous intermediaries with an opportunity to switch horse for beef.

With horse meat two or three times cheaper, the magazine wrote, “the profit from the switch is reckoned to be €300,000 [$400,000] for every 25 tonnes.”

In an era of affluence, Europeans became accustomed to spending a diminishing portion of their weekly household budgets on food. But with strapped families facing tighter budgets at a time of austerity and rising international food prices, the trend has reversed.

Supermarkets have responded by attempting to keep prices down at the expense, according to critics, of content and quality.

“In a highly competitive market our food industry has not changed its business model,” according to Laura Sandys, a Conservative legislator, writing in The Times of London on Thursday. “Instead it has tried to adapt to food inflation by fitting a more expensive product into a cheap price structure.”

Ms. Sandys, concluding that “the era of cheap food is, sadly, over,” said consumers were unwittingly absorbing the rising costs of meat and grain through reductions in quality and quantity.

“So the £1 [$1.55] cottage pie in your local freezer shop will be the same price that it has been for years,” she wrote, “but today will contain less meat and more artificial fillers such as high fructose corn syrup.”

Pamela Robinson, a supply chain expert at the University of Birmingham in Britain, told The Daily Telegraph, that pressure to sell food more and more cheaply had led to the horse meat scandal.

She said supermarkets were going to have to acknowledge food prices needed to go up if they were to guarantee quality. Families also needed to be educated on how to eat healthily on a budget, rather than relying on cheap processed foods that could no longer guarantee quality.

In the midst of the horse meat scandal, some consumers are already voting with their feet.

A poll for the Sky News broadcaster indicated one-in-five British shoppers had changed their buying habits since the scandal broke. More than half of those had abandoned processed meat entirely.

Traditional butcher shops supplying well-sourced but more expensive meat have meanwhile reported a spike in sales of up to 30 percent.

In the spirit of the times, the BBC published a handy guide to healthy alternatives to pre-packaged, industrially processed foods.

The broadcaster’s Hannah Briggs quoted gastronomes who sang the praises of brined ox tongue and beef brisket, adding: “You could also try curing pig cheeks or chaps in salt and seasoning with Indonesian long pepper and herbs.”

But is the European public really ready to return to a mythical age in which a family of four could go for a week on a boiled cow heel or a pot of tripe? Or will we have to adjust to spending more for our food and less on luxuries?

And the quote of the night is, "back in my stunt meat eating daze in China." I can only imagine some of the exotic foods available in China. I really need to visit there one day. It's on the bucket list fo sho.

China has faced poverty like no other nation. So they eat everything. There's no waste. Boiled cow heel or a pot of tripe? Luxury! Ironically, some of the most revolting meats get converted into gourmet delicacies. The experience really forced me to rethink the American diet.

[bawang]

This brings us back to Syn7's point:




China has faced poverty like no other nation. So they eat everything. There's no waste. Boiled cow heel or a pot of tripe? Luxury! Ironically, some of the most revolting meats get converted into gourmet delicacies. The experience really forced me to rethink the American diet.

kraft dinner has chemicals used in rocket fuel, we are not far off.