40% Meat And Wood – Yummy Food

There are numerous strategies for eating better. One simple thing you often hear is to eat simple, natural foods. I think one friend of mine described his diet as the “gorilla diet” (i.e., eat only foods that a gorilla could find naturally).

That being said, I was surprised to hear that something could be considered “beef” even if it only contains 40% beef. This came up in a recent lawsuit where Taco Bell was found to only have 36% “beef” in their products. Does that surprise you?

So, maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked to learn that we are eating wood. Yes. There is wood in some of the food we eat. Well, technically, it’s wood pulp called cellulose that’s used in cat litter, plastic, and food. It gives you fiber and helps canned goods last longer, BUT up to 3.5% of meat can be from cellulose.

These types of stories remind me of when I was in fifth grade eating my hotdog for lunch and found a ziplock bag cooked inside of the hotdog. Sometimes, you don’t want to know what happens in the kitchen / factory. I was glad years ago when I worked on a Y2K project for a big food company that I got the corporate project not the factory project at the meat processing plants.

This information combined with the text message I got from a diabetes program we’re running for a client (as part of the test deployment) which said that you gain 15 pounds a year if you drink a soda a day maybe enough to make me change my eating habits.