Bailey's Girl said:Bob (this one) said:Bailey's Girl said:nanner wrote:
> "jiml" <[email hidden]> wrote
>
>> Okay, I baked this chicken last week. The significant other, who
>> doesn't eat even fresh chicken had some delicious meals all week, so
>> the chicken just sat in the fridge. Then yesterday, I took it out of
>> the fridge and it was slick on top and had a foul odor. no pun
>> intended.
>>
>> I deboned it and had this huge plate full of chicken meat that was a
>> little past its prime, but I was very hungry, so I got out all the
>> spices I could find and covered all the meat on all sides and then
>> heated it covered in the microwave until it was steaming hot.
>>
>> It wasn't bad but was it bad for me?
>>
>> Dkid
>>
> DH's grandfather owned a deli 50-60 years ago, he said it was common
> for some places to bleach chicken that was going bad to get rid of
> the smell. He didn't do that himself but said it was common. If
> people could each bleach half-rancid chicken then I bet yours will
> be fine!
ugh -- another good reason to stay out of fast food places?
Never worked in a food market or restaurant, did you? 50-60 years ago,
I can guarantee it wasn't a fast food place. Did jerking your knee
that hard hurt it?
Hi, Bob!
Yup, sure did. Just long enough to get fired. 🙂
Um, sure. See that was a reference to a knee-jerk reaction to say
something negative about fast food places. It's clear you know virtually
nothing about their operations.
You weren't there long enough to notice that except for the places
specifically breading and frying cut-up chicken, it all came in to the
stores frozen and pre-breaded. And the ones that handle fresh chicken
pieces use their inventory within 24 hours. But why let facts interfere?
Quoted message said:If you look at some of the other messages, you'll see this wasn't just
going on 50 or 60 years ago and magically stopped. Still happening in
"modern times".
At the end of this note, find some actual history.
Quoted message said:My knee's fine. My neck is still a little sore, though, from the double
take when I saw you never worked in a restaurant. 🙂
Wow! You really got it going on. I've owned 5 restaurants and worked in
7 more including running country clubs, ski resorts, stand-alone places
and farmers' markets. My first restaurant job was 1953. My first food
market job was 1955. Got out of active food service operations three
years ago.
Here's a piece I published a few years back.
---------------------------
THE BAD OLD DAYS
There are these amazing ideas floating around that couldn't be more
wrong - and you probably believe some of them. They're part wishful
thinking, part ignorance of history, part prejudice and part the result
of misinformation from "experts".
Here are specific examples:
* That at some time in the past, foods were better for us.
* That "natural" and "pure" somehow equal "healthful".
* That putting commercial additives in food automatically makes them
inferior to the foods with nothing added.
* That processing foods destroys their inherent goodness and
nutritional integrity.
How's that? Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? It's all nonsense. Every
one of these "truths" isn't necessarily true and is usually false.
Sometime around the year 1365, a long poem called "Piers the Plowman"
was written by a Londoner who chronicled much of daily living. Because
of adulteration of foods, people are suffering, he says and it's the job
of English officials
To punish...
Brewers, bakers, butchers and cooks;
For these be the men on earth who do most harm
To the poor people who buy piece-meal.
They poison the people secretly and most often...
Four hundred years later with the publication of "The Expedition of
Humphrey Clinker" in 1771, the complaints about London's foods have
persisted and intensified. Says Matthew Bramble, a character in the
book, "As to... wine, it is a vile, unpalatable, and pernicious
sophistication, balderdashed (mixed) with cyder, corn-spirit and the
juice of sloes... The bread... is a... paste, mixed up with chalk, alum
and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution."
He comments that the miller and baker MUST make flour and bread this
way because people insist on the whitest breads with no concern for
nutritive value. White is more important than good.
Milk is made from "faded cabbage leaves and sour draff," (spoiled milk
usually fed to pigs) "lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised
snails, carried through streets in open pails... the tallowy rancid
mass, called butter, is manufactured with candle-grease and
kitchen-stuff..."
And, bad as the food is, something else is even worse, he says as he
goes on in sarcastic indignation, "Now, all these enormities might be
remedied with a very little attention to... civil regulation; but the
wise patriots of London have taken it into their heads, that all
regulation is inconsistent with liberty."
Beer was adulterated in ways that are puzzling to us today.
Unscrupulous brewers added coriander, red pepper, tobacco, opium and
other narcotics, licorice, ginger, linseed, molasses and some kinds of
metal salts to improved the foam.
That took care of it, right? As soon as all this nasty stuff was made
public, the government immediately corrected the situation, right?
Sure, just like in real life.
Well, a half century later, in 1820, Frederick Accum, an English
Chemist, published a book numbingly titled "A treatise on adulterations
of food, and culinary poisons exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications
of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream,
confectionery, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles and
other articles employed in domestic economy and methods of detecting
them." Not at all scary.
The title page features an engraved urn with a skull perched atop it
draped with a shroud and the inscription "There is death in the pot"
from the Second book of Kings in the old testament. You don't even have
to read the book, it's all right there in the name.
In this country there were similar concerns and protests. Upton
Sinclair wrote about the disgusting and dangerous conditions in the meat
packing industry and other writers shouted about other issues. Around
the turn of the century laws were enacted that covered some of these
problems.
But it wasn't until 1914 that narcotics were controlled and therefore
removed from foods and patent medicines, the so-called "soothing
syrups." I'll bet they soothed. Real, addictive drugs. It's estimated
that there were more than 2,500,000 addicts in this country in the years
just before the First World War.
The conclusion here seems to be that the only safe, good food in all of
history has been that which the eater personally grew.
Well, that's not true, either. Plants contain "natural" pesticides and
toxins. Things as different as green potatoes, apricot pits, lima
beans, cabbage, rhubarb leaves or those pretty red and blue mushrooms
called "Death's Heads" all produce "natural" poisons. You can name others.
Cultivating and hybridizing the plants for thousands of years has
helped them evolve to new strains with less potential for poisoning us,
but in some cases, it's still there. Really, don't eat rhubarb leaves.
If you eat the right plants in the right amounts, you will experience
a "natural" death.
Bacteria, microbes and viruses are just as much a part of nature as we
are and they would have much more fun with us if we didn't control them
by cooking, chilling and chemically preserving. Nature is not neutral
or benign.
Here's the bizarre inconsistency - we want our food to be pretty, every
pepper green, shiny, crisp and big, every carrot tapered, bright and
heavy. No blemishes, no spots and it should sit unspoiled and unwilted
in the refrigerator until we decide to use it, as though it came from
some Henry Ford farm producing identically perfect tomatoes, matched
melons and esthetically equal eggplants. And there should be no
chemicals used to get there; no chemical fertilizers, no insecticides,
no fungicides, no waxes to make it shiny, no gases in the boats or
railroad cars from the fields to the stores.
And here's how the real world works: we'll reject any food in the store
that shows "natural" blemishes from insects, branches that rub, bruises,
blood spots or anything. (Of course, if we butcher the meat or pick
things from our garden, they can have some imperfections and we'll still
eat them.) We'll still whine about additives. Want perfect apples?
Yes? Want Alar? No? Then, according to the laws of physics and
biology; you can't have perfect apples. Oh, I see. You want perfect
apples, anyway.
Oh, yes, additives. They're all bad. Everybody knows that. Never
mind that modern foods don't spoil so quickly, taste better, look better
and, in a stunning twist of the conventional wisdom, can be better and
safer for you than the "natural" counterpart.
BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) is a preservative long condemned by some
very vocal consumer advocates. Suddenly, they stopped griping and
started praising it because some antiviral and antiaging properties were
uncovered in researching its effects. Other "unnatural" ingredients
have come in for similar changes in perspective.
In recent years, gums have come under fire. Gums like gum arabic,
carrageenan, guar gum, pectin and others. What they do is make food
feel smoother when you eat. Ice creams, all kinds of desserts, sauces
and lots of other things have gums in them. Some researchers said they
may help reduce serum cholesterol; all tests aren't in yet. Right, you
guessed it. Praise. And food supplements out the next week available
in your neighborhood health food store, pharmacy, grocery and also by
mail order.
And, oh by the way, food is cheaper today than it has ever been
BECAUSE it's processed and preserved. Don't tell me that ground beef
was only 19 cents a pound when you were a kid. Tell me how many hours
you had to work to buy a pound of meat. It's cheaper today than ever
before in all of human history. In this country. Not everywhere.
In other parts of the world as much as one-fifth of all food spoils,
much of it rotted grain. Unavailable. Gone. It doesn't matter how
"natural", "pure" and "unadulterated" it was. Nobody got to eat it
BECAUSE it wasn't processed or preserved.
It's kind of funny that we have this idea about additives; that
they're all bad. Goiter isn't a health problem of any magnitude in this
country anymore, hasn't been since the thirties but it sure was before
then. That's because iodine in salt prevents it. That's right, it's an
additive. Like vitamins A and D in milk. Some breakfast cereals boast
about their additives, saying that they provide 100% of many vitamins
and minerals. Where did you think all that goodness came from if not
additives? Bread has added nutrients.
There is an irony at work here. Kurt Vonnegut in one of his books
talks about soft drinks. About how they boast of having no calories, no
nutritive value, nothing good for us. It's a multi-billion dollar
industry. Excuse me?
Nitrates, nitrites, nitrosamines. Cyclamates. Saccharin. Nutrasweet.
BHA. Bleached/unbleached. They really are issues and I'm not
suggesting we dismiss the questions. What I am saying is that they are
questions, not conclusions. We need responsible research into all these
questions.
Not the kind of pop science reports that end up needlessly terrifying
people about salmonella or offering garbled noises about butter, fat,
margarine and oils. Until then, maybe the best advice we could follow
is to treat ourselves gently.
Should we let the manufacturers and processors decide what goes into
our food without scrutiny, without standards, without accountability?
Should they be looked at with "a very little attention to...civil
regulation"? You call it.
It's my opinion that they often do a good job, given that it all
happens in the real world. That's not to say it couldn't be much better
but, all in all, they should get one lone "attaboy" for a valiant effort.
