Let me rant

So I watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution last night and I really support the overall idea.  However, I have a few problems with the show.

First of all, Jamie Oliver is 100% correct to say that America should be eating healthier. And I love his approach to say that you can eat anything you want, as long as you look at what is included.  To take his point to an extreme I will tell you that recently I made polish sausages from pork shoulder, natural casing and of course a lot more.(but I knew exactly what went in there)  I also made coney sauce (chili) from scratch.  One night (actually, a lot of nights) I took those things, added mustard and buns and made my own chili dogs.  According to what Jamie Oliver preaches the unhealthiest part of this meal was the bun and mustard.  Because I made the sausage and chili myself I know that there was no high-fructose or hydrogenated anything.

No, I'm not claiming that chili dogs are healthy.  But I am stating that the worst part of chili dogs is all the unnatural ingredients that go into them.  Why would you need sugar in your hot dogs? Yet if you look at the ingredients, most hot dogs contain some sweetener.  High fructose corn syrup or whatever. Yech!

While on the subject of processed meats, that brings be back to Jamie's show.  He took 6 children and did a genius experiment with them.  He took a whole chicken, removed each piece (breasts, wings, thighs, legs) and took the carcass, with scrap meat on it and blended it up.  He took that puree and smooshed it through a sieve to separate the meat from bone and added "binders" and "flavorants" (I believe the actual ingredients were representative of the binders and flavorants) and pressed them into nugget shape and breaded and fried them.  He asked the kids who wanted to eat those nuggets. He expected the children to react to watching the 'chicken puree' ooze through the sieve and all of them being turned off, but 4, I mean, 5, I mean all of them said yes (the number changed cause I believe kids raised their hands as they saw others lead the way)

Fact is, he was shocked that the experiment failed.  But I would have raised my hand too. The biggest opposition I have to the entire process is what is in the bowls of "binders" and "flavorants" because he has just shown me that mechanically separated chicken is still chicken.

Tonight I took a whole chicken and tore it apart.  I cut off the breasts and saved them for later.  I cut off all meat from the thighs and legs and used them in a chicken fried rice and I took all the rest of the bones and skin and whatnot and turned it into chicken stock.  Are you to tell me that my chicken stock is on the same level as McDonald's McNuggets? I don't know if that's a compliment to McDonald's or an insult to my chicken stock.

I always assumed that the worst part of 'mechanically separated chicken' was the paste that came out at the end.  But Jamie Oliver showed me that paste is as natural as the boneless skinless breasts it came from. I am most scared of the binders and flavorants. But he blew by those ingredients like it was as natural as the bread crumbs for breading the nuggets.

I don't know. I seem to be torn between his point of, 'We are eating crap', and his methods of, 'You should be wasteful and not eat the less desirable cuts'. I know that is not his overall message, but that is the message he projected on this one specific point.

Let me stop now. I have chapters that I could write on this situation. I would rather keep this to a blog-posting length. So I will say good night.