Using as much of the slaughtered animal as possible,
is a truly laudable aim (and the reason we have black puddings and haggis - and who would want to go without them?). That said, and as much as I love offal, this really does sound disgusting.
Brussels-funded boffins say they have hit upon a brilliant method of creating "enriched" ice-cream, fortified with "disused" animal products which are normally thrown away by the meat industry as being unfit for human consumption. A press release issued by an EU-funded "research media centre" breaks the news of the stunning …
That it sounds disgusting doesn't matter too much. People were happy with Findus products before they knew what they were eating, and sausage and haggis primarily exist to use things that otherwise wouldn't be sold.
A bigger concern is that this has the hallmarks of BSE all over again. Maybe we now now enough about prions and the like to contain that. But when the objective is to force feed as much of the carcass as possible to the unsuspecting population, what's the chances that we won't find new and exciting side effects, both chemical and biological?
<------------ That's not coffee on that keyboard, BTW.
People might still be happy enough if the Findus lasagne was labelled as horse, the taboo may well fail pretty fast.
The fuss really is about not knowing what you're eating, and about the fact that unregulated and untraced meat could get into the food chain so easily. It's an issue of trust in rather than of some sort of bizarre hippophagophobia.
I thought BSE was not solely due to ingesting prions in marrow \ offal but due to farmers feeding cows on cows (ground up cow bones and everything they couldn't pass off as a burger and also in some cases cow excrement as food). Specifically that it is canabalism element that was generating the problem and that eating normal grass fed cow brains is fine. I could of course be going senile so please do correct me if I'm wrong.
Edit: I'l correct myself :-) it was from cow meal contaminated by sheep infected with scrapie. So cow brain can be safe as long as mad sheep are kept away :-)
I don't have a huge issue with eating more of an animal, it doesn't even have to be stuffed in icecream, but I think we do need to ensure it's safe before we start ramming cow tonka down invalids throats. People may flinch at roast cow cock, but do they flinch at kebabs (ok some people may :-)) on a good day a kebab is foreskins, lips and arseholes.
Many of these parts are available as puppy treats. My dog loves "bully sticks" (bull penis), tendons, bladder, cartilage, trachea, ears, tripe, hearts, lung. They're all desiccated and only marginally smelly (but hey, if they didn't stink a little, he probably wouldn't touch them). I'm pretty sure they're a more wholesome option for him than dog biscuits.
Indeed, some breeds of dogs (esp Bull terriers for some reason) are actually allergic to wheat and other fillers used in biscuits, tinned and dried commercial dog foods (they get major skin infections and problems especially around their feet) - the meat products - even from the less pleasant sounding bits - are far better for dogs than the commercial treats.
As to eating all the unpleasant bits - 'beef' in 'burgers' normally comes from a cow/bull - but where from you really really don't want to know - but does it matter? Not once its been nicely cooked on the bbq and washed down with some decent beer.
This is a fscked up as anything Monsanto would invent. Which is particularly disturbing as you folks over in Europe seem to have government officials a little less stupid when it comes to food than the ones we are stuck with in the Land Of The Free (tm).
What could *possibly* go wrong?
There are so many ways this is a bad idea its scary. Just one bit of reclaimed meat product with dribbling bovine disease & a whole run is contaminated. Not to mention all the numerous zoonoses you can get from Gods dumbest animal, the Sheep..
Then theres the whole 'named meat & I dont mean Rover' issue.
And meaty goodness from latvian slaughter houses that had their last proper sluice down when the Berlin Wall came down..
All in all this sounds like it belongs in a Monkey Dust episode - but after all alot of OAP homes seem to enjoy beating their residents like Chipperfield monkeys as a matter of policy, so it should fit perfectly...
Come back Bayview, your sins are forgiven...!
I don't mind the idea of eating some of these parts. I mean look at china, the sexual organs, eyes, guts, all of it used. Hell it wasn't that long ago everything was used over ehre too. But gradually EU regulation has blocked off these animal parts from human consumption even though they made a pretty good stew. Now they're trying to reintroduce it to us? Can't they just make up their minds?
everyone is competing for the most repulsive idea imaginable Quite.
It makes me consider rejecting any food I didn't process myself. Sorry: that could have been worded better.
But the issue is overriding the human instinct where we pick out the bits we don't like the look of. I expect that there is a lot of self preservation in this instinct, but it's not 100% reliable (examples, anyone?), and if we avoid Bad Science we should be able to improve our health.
So now it all turns into trusting scientists, politicians and the food industry, because I haven't the stomach for butchering, or biology, or, on a bad day, even cutting out the squidgy bits from vegetables.
I remember when our daughter was very young we had only just managed to coax her to start her dinner when our son said "She would have been all right, but she saw one of the carrots moving".
Paris, because she knows about squidgy bits versus pleasure.
...Seemingly the horsemeat ice-cream or other products would be ideal as a dietary supplement for those needing "specialised protein products", such as "sick people, the elderly and athletes"....
Why does it only seem 'ideal' as a supplement for people who may not have much choice about what they are given to eat? They could have added baby food....
I am looking for EU funding to make a nutritious gruel out of mud, to be served at orphanages...
Why any surprise? Both measures are driven by vested interests. In the case of this meat slurry idea, the food processors are looking to make more money, and have realised that the gormless nerks of the EU will support anything that purports to "reduce waste". In the case of olive oil, it's to "prevent fraud", meaning that Southern European producers want to make sure that people are buying as much of their product as possible.
As in Westminster, so it is in Brussels. Politicians work for whoever buys them lunch, and that's not the voters.
We should not ridicule such a laudable idea, after all there are millions of people in poor areas in Africa where they don't even have clean water to drink (send only £3 per month etc.). Forget the water, what they are all really craving is ice cream. Just think of all those happy faces when the cheery jingle of the ice-cream vans ring through their primitive villages. Don't teach a man how to fish just send some organic ice-cream.
To all those 'oh noes! Teh mad cows' commenters - there'll be little additional risk from rogue prion diseases (BSE/Scrapie => vCJD) - the relevant tissue is considered specified risk material (SRM) and has to be destroyed by incineration, the legislation covering all this is quite tough (and a good reason to be up in arms about the horse meat scandal even if you don't mind noshing on a bit of pony - where and how those animals were raised, slaughtered and butchered is anyone's guess, you have no idea what welfare issues, diseases and drug residues were present with no public health oversight).
I agree we should practice old fashioned 'nose to tail eating'; no expensively produced protein should be lost form a carcass, but it should not be dressed up as something it's not ('chicken' nuggets etc.).
All well and good, but overlooks the real reason why that particular risk shouldn't worry anyone.
After the dust had settled, it was proved that the whole thing was bugger all to do with anything endemic in cattle spinal tissue and was actually due to isolated incidents of cross contamination from scrapie afflicted sheep, as was originally suspected all along. This goes a long way toward explaining why the vast epidemic of vCJD predicted rather conspicuously failed to occur.
DEFRA decided to keep that under wraps, for fear of being sued into the middle of next century for their hysterical overreaction and gratuitous, unfounded screwing over of the British beef industry.
That's not quite right, or at lease a misunderstanding. While we still don't know precisely what the origin of BSE was, it's a good working hypothesis that Scrapie from sheep was indeed the initial spark (but there are other ideas, such as the endogenous virus hypothesis).
However, the species barrier in transmitting a TSE is immense - so there is very little chance of you receiving a dose of BSE prion that would cause you vCJD, or of a cow receiving a BSE-inducing inoculation from sheep meal - but once it has occurred, there is a much higher chance of then passing on that infectious prion through cannibalism (cf. kuru in man). The problem being that we fed ruminants other ruminants - so-called MBM (meat & bone meal). We only saw it here in the UK first because we changed the way we manufactured MBM at the end of the 70s and apparently the new method did not control the infectious vector.
We KNOW this was an important infection route just from looking at the disease surveillance data - as soon as the feeding ban was brought in around '88 the incidence of BSE in cattle shot down from tens of thousands to almost nothing. In the UK - partially because of this whole sorry affair - we have tremendously active public health surveillance, and as a result of all this effort in 2010-11 there were NO cases of BSE in our national herd. That's quite an achievement.
BUT!
If you were unlucky enough to be infected with vCJD, the duration of the incubation period before the appearance of clinical symptoms would be strongly linked to your genotype: specifically, a methionine/valine polymorphism at codon 129 of the gene coding for the human prion protein.
Human clinical vCJD disease seemed to peak in 2000*, but ALL of these cases were known MM homozygotes. The predction of a 'second vast epidemic' you allude to was because of the potential vulnerability of MV or VV homozygous humans, who were thought to be (and may still be) at risk of developing vCJD.
As usual with these things, the truth is much stranger than fiction.
I'll get my coat.
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*Data from http://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/documents/figs.pdf
I suspect its bull :)
Of course some stuff like hide is used for shoes and so forth. Bones are used for whatever bones are used for (isn't it to help making bone china nice and thin and semi transparent) but I think the vast majority of the rest is fed to us one way or another.
The interesting thing is that you aren't allowed to feed your left over dinner to pigs anymore (pigswill is banned) - probably because the stuff they feed us is so bloody bad we aren't allowed to be that cruel to pigs!
Well lets face it that grass based porridge they developed for the gulags was a bit bland.
Mind you I think (with a bit of clever marketing) it would have made an excellent slimming aid .
"Developed by a top team of NKVD nutritionists this product will aid weight loss as part of a 10 year prison sentence."
I am old enough to think that I remember a big scandal thrown up 10s of years ago, because it was discovered that the "non-milk protein" and also some "non-milk fat" in ice cream was being derived from animal by products such as pig's blood.
They do say that people that don't study history are destined to repeat it ...
Lots of stuff is Protein; however a lot of it is low quality, indigestible, an allergen, or even harmful; so this is a lot worse than Nuts!
As for Health/Fitness food, stupid greedy idea. I'll only buy top quality Protein with known safe ingredients, because only quality Protein produces results; so no rubbish or synthetic chemicals.
Well, maybe the protein is properly hydrolysed first by applying sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid.
That would give something with lots of glutamate (taste enhancer!) resembling soy sauce or Marmite or Maggi, not to mention the more extreme exotic variants of "garum" or Bovril.
I wonder what the "disused" percentages are in the US? I mean, until late last year 70% of our ground beef had a filler of "lean finely textured beef" (basically the stuff that falls onto the floor, sterilized with ammonia and heat and blended, then stuck back into the ground beef.) There's "partially defatted beef fatty tissue" (don't know what this is.) I expect that we may use somewhat more of the animal here.
On the other hand, we don't ordinarily eat black pudding or kidneys here.
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Let's get this right...
We have 3D printed psuedo-food on the way that will at some point become an "order from the wall" food source (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/23/ctrl_p_for_pizza/)
We have Soylent (insert colour of choice here) already with us http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/21/soylent_food_replacement/
And now we are feeding the elderly with reconstituted "unfit for human consumption" leftovers in ice cream.
Dystopian future not so much with the "future" any more it seems...
To make ice cream you need to impregnate cows, and the male babies are kept in plastic igloos (isolated from their mothers and each other) until a year of age to be sold as veal; the meat and milk industries are economically and hence ethically linked. So, I see no real ethical problem with adding meat to ice cream, other than forced pregnancy, imprisonment of babies, and eventual killing of said mothers and babies.