Can someone tell me what "Mechanically separated" meat actually means???

[LadyTophamHatt]

It sounds replusive and I have a feeling I'm not going to like it.....

It's the stuff removed from the bones once the choice cuts have been taken effectively meat slurry

Hmmmmm, nice.

Isn't it sprayed off with a hose?

It's sort of jet washed off and can include bits of anyhting on the carcass and costs about a tenth of a flesh cut per kilo and is used to bulk up porcessed products

OMG are you serious? ANd they can sell that as 'food'? Bleurgh!

Dh bought a tin of hotdog sausages once for the boys' tea - when I looked on the ingredients and it said 'mechanically recovered meat' or something I threw it in the bin Didn't really know what it meant but it didn't sound good!

Probably the same hotdogs we've just eaten GDK

I would have chucked them too if I'd read it first!

Am I correct in thinking that MacDonalds burgers contain mechanically recovered meat?

They certainly used to (before BSE) and I don't remember hearing they had changed.

No, they definitely don't and I really don't think they ever did.
Neither does babyfood.

That's Okay then.

DS gets Macd's about once a month as a special treat.

They use 'whole cuts of forequarter and flank' to be precise!

But what would actually be wrong with eating it though? It doesn't sound nice but as long as the animal isn't diseased, what's the problem?

people are so squemish today when I was a child we used to make brawn from pigs trotters and pig's heads - biol them ip and scrape all the little bits of meat of yum

and what about making stock wioth chicken carcasses and boiling up bones

aaahhh the good old days [sigh]

iota, My sis and BIL did that when they raised 2 pigs and had them slaughtered a couple of years ago. My mum loved the brawn, hadn't eaten it for years.

And you are right, we are more sqeamish about food these days, and the supermarkets exploit that, by selling us food that 'looks' right, regardless of how it tastes, or how much is wasted in the process.

I think it's the industrialisation of the process which is questiuonable, was discredited by BSE when it was suggested that even though the spinal chord was removed there was still a risk of nervous tissue ending up in the slurry (and i think that it seemed as stuff from the machoinery itself was cleaned off and included.

And that people were unaware of the cheap poor quality meat they were getting.

Not quite the same as grandma or hugh fearnleywittingstall doing it in the kitchen