I just want to say

If it is not made from sheep meat (mutton, lamb etc) it is not shepherd's pie.

Seriously, people. Cut that shit out.

Where's the Meat?

Lays "all natural" BLT chips are described as containing a "delicious blend of bacon, ripe tomatoes and cool lettuce".

Lays BLT chips actually contain, as the 8th ingredient, "natural bacon type flavor"

Digging around in other ingredient list I find that "bacon type flavor" is normally made of:some combination of

sunflower oil
smoke flavor (?)
Hydrolyzed Corn Soy Wheat Gluten Protein (?)
Maltodextrin
Autolyzed Yeast Extract
Soy, Corn and Wheat Protein

and the ubiquitous other "natural flavors" (???)

(link, link, link)

Other natural flavors are...?  Some rendered pig fat possibly?  or...?


As ingredient lists go, this is a bit useless as I am left fundamentally unsure whether one, or more, of the four allegedly key ingredients are actually used in the product at all.

And don't even get me started on "lettuce type flavor".

Peta doesn't give a damn about your so-called "feminism".

'[via Sociological Images]

Oh... but it gets worse:

[via the Bilerico Project]

Where have you gone Gloria Steinem, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you....

See also:

• Feminism, PETA, & Montréal

Cosmetic Plumping

Based on my last few posts you might expect "Say No to Plumping" to be about cosmetic surgery, and it is. Sort of.

It seems even meat can't look like meat anymore. Payments are lower of you have spotted or striped pigs because the consumer doesn't know natural pigment from mold so these pigs need to be skinned before packaging. Steak is sprinkled with chemicals to help it keep a red, freshly dead color rather than a natural dark brown. And chicken is soaked in saltwater to make it fatter and heavier.

So Foster Farms makes an explicit connection between meat primping and cosmetic surgery with their "Say No to Plumping" campaign, complete with a bizarre little video with talking chickens. --"I've been thinking about having some plumping done...a lot of chicken's are having it done, Betsy." -- But, well, frankly I find chickens talking about being fatter and tastier, in the voices of chatty female friends pretty damn unappetising. If anything it makes me roll my eyes at Foster Farms.

The entire campaign website contains a total of about one page of largely unreferenced moral panic statements suggesting plumped chicken is a direct route to cardiac arrest and stomach cancer, reference to science no data actually on the site, and the whole thing excessively plumped up with talking animals. Chicken who want to be centerfold of succulant fleshiness.

Chickens are to women what public health campaign are to preachy ad campaigns--totally different things, thank you very much. (I also note that the chicken actors aren't beak or claw trimmed for our convenience. I bet all the chickens actually raised on at Foster Farms are and that whole issue worries me more than some saltwater.)

In the economic section the amount of "plump" versus real meat is calculated based on a nice heterosexual marraige with one child eating the purely speculative industry ideal of four chicken meal a week. Uh-huh. --"Plumping is deceiving, Martha."-- I am sure the idea is that natural is better. but in the end this campaign read more like a creepy male point-of-view rant about how women use cosmetics to seem more beautiful than they are, cheating the male "consumer".

Ewww.

For added "ewww" factor try replacing the word "plump" with other words in the little videos.

"The people who want to plump me say no one would ever find out".