this is the nastiest thing i have ever seen in my life and the fda approved this mess. i bet they don’t let their families eat this crap!!!!!!!!!! that’s just sick and we allow our children to eat this junk, too. i will no longer buy hotdogs!!!!!! in the name of Jesus i pray for those who know about this and don’t spread the word. how do the workers deal with this mess? do they sleep well at night?

That is absolutely disgusting! I am very happy I don’t eat right now. If I did, I think I would need to throw up.

Thanks for sharing this information. It is one of those pictures that is worth a thousand words.

Advanced Meat Recovery?
*gasp* sounds like a non-profit organization for vegetarians haha
but seriously:
the colour HAS to be articficial right? When I worked at McDonalds thats exactly what the strawberry milkshake “beverage mix” looked like! no lies!

wow i came across this in somebodys blog (http://veganepicurean.blogspot.com/) she was pretty horrified also. this makes me appreciate being vegan even more. this is pretty bad, it looks like that toy foam stuff kids play with…..hmmmmm..no….??

No wonder we humans are suffering from so many types of cancer, muscular diseases and heart problems! The so-called food we’re offered is toxic and no one with authority is telling the public.

This is legal? And this is what the “food” police say is acceptable for human consumption? Obviously they think less of the general public than the corporations who make billions off this offal. (sorry, couldn’t resist; but what else would you call something that looks like swollen pepto bismal?

Hi,
I’m going to write a post about the mechanically separated meat (VSM in french : viande séparée mécaniquement). Thank you for this picture. It’s possible to use it (I’ll indicate the source).
Thank a lot for you good work !

It’s not that it’s in paste form, (isn’t pâté an expensive delicacy?), nor that they’re dookieing it out en mass fro-yo style into those weird boxes (probably an efficient, if inelegant, way to portion it out in bulk), nor even that they’re using as much of the chicken as possible (which I actually think is good–hey the little fella had to die, might as well eat all that’s eatable), nor that there are weird parts going in here (from the description it seems to be pretty much just muscle scraps, not beaks or something)–what makes me more worried about this kind of thing is what kinds of fillers, chemicals and additives that they might easily mix into this stuff before it ends up as a hot dog or a nugget.

How many of you have ever been involved in the home butchering of hogs or cattle? And yes the chickens killed for sunday dinner? We stuffed our own casings from the animals we butchered. Oh well, we only added the spices that were on the cupboard shelf so I guess that we were the healthy ones. Maybe we should all get a patch of land and produce our own. And, checken feet are not too bad when food is scarce. You see, I went through THE DEPRESSION when times were REALLY TOUGH.

I admit that looking at it makes me gag a little, but there’s no difference from eating that paste and picking the last bit of meat off of a bone that you cooked in an oven or on a grill or whatever. I wouldn’t want to eat a spoonful of it and i would be worried about some of the chemicals but if you were starving in Ethiopia or any other third world country then a can of this stuff would be worth it’s weight in gold.

Peggy Vegosen :
No wonder we humans are suffering from so many types of cancer, muscular diseases and heart problems! The so-called food we’re offered is toxic and no one with authority is telling the public.

Whaa? Where did the post say this was toxic? It’s not toxic: it’s chicken. This just happens to be the part of the chicken that is closer to the bones and is thus harder to remove from the carcass.

God people grow up. I worked in a place that made this so i guarantee you i have more experience than any or you how this stuff is made. Much of the chicken is the breast “shells” which is basically the leftover ribcage after the breast meat has been removed. They grind these up and run them through a centrifuge. Since the bone and meat are different densities it is separated. The bone paste goes into everything from pet foods to fertilizers. And if you think that there are not any additives put on the choice cuts in the supermarket you are kidding yourself, preservatives and colouring are jut a few. Unless you are going to grow and butcher your own beef then you are going to injest stuff like this.

Wrap that in bacon, deep fry it and put a candle on it for my birthday please.

Yum.

mmmm… soylent pink

That’s really cool, actually. Imagine how much food we’re saving. And by eating that stuff, which seems perfectly fine, just think of how many animals we DON’T have to raise- that’s less strain on our food and all that stuff about animal waste harming the Ozone and water systems, etc. I’m no food expert, but if that stuff’s clean meat that’s just been pulverized, it seems fine to me. And the fact that it looks like taffy is always fun. I wonder if animal bone marrows are used in stuff like hot dogs? They’re edible and supposedly pretty good as a food source, although in America it’s just not common. Kind of like entomophagy. Mm, giant water bugs.

OK…so am I the only one who thinks this is kind of neat? I’d love to see how the actual process works, esp. how they get every last shred of meat but nothing else.

I almost kinda wish you could buy it like this. Remember that modeling clay you could get and when you made something you liked, you could bake it in the oven and it would be permanent? This could be just like that, only you would put it in the oven and it would come out dinner. Can’t you just picture it? Mom calls you in, you spend the afternoon making little creatures and bowls and stuff, break out the ol’ Play Doh extruders, and in a few hours, dinner! Best. Meal. Ever.

PS: Just read Karli’s note. OK, so I’m not the only one. Awesome.

i’m not lying, i’m actually hungry for a hot dog right now. they should be doing this to all animals that we eat… and maybe some that we don’t. bear dogs, anyone?

I gotta think bear dogs would be grizzly–er, gristly. But you do make a point. My late partner was about half American Indian, and literally used to go out and hunt her breakfast in the morning when she was a kid (the other half was hillbilly, y’see). She said the attitude she was raised with was, it was all right to make use of the land and the animals around it, but you had to be respectful and not waste. This, to me, says less waste, and that’s cool.

So what’s the difference between this and me boiling the hell out of chicken bones to make soup stock? Grow up, people.

I love this sh@t! I eat chicken nuggets every day.

Barney…..was here.

Good find! Do you know where there are anymore pictures like this? People need to see this stuff.

This is acceptable to people or they would not buy it.

This is disgusting I will never touch another hot dog again!!!

Seems kinda odd to me that they would be packing that in a cardboard box rather than a leakproof container. Wouldn’t chicken (even after being processed) still be somewhat wet and need a watertight container? Not to mention, totally unsanitary to put food on cardboard that will absorb everything. Crazy pic!

Since I raise most of my meat and eggs I don’t see a lot of this. But don’t kid yourselves. If you are buying meat in the supermarket, you are getting additives and antibiotics in your meat. They put it in there the easiest way possible. They FEED it to the animals. If you want natural meat, get from a farmer, and you can ask to see the feed labels. My lamb & eggs are not organic, but they are natural. Sadly the lamb costs more to raise than I can sell it for. May just have to give it up…Or hope that people can begin to understand that it is expensive to raise meat! And then they might understand the simple economics of this sort of stuff.

If you put any “normal” chicken parts through a grinder, this is what you would have. Any meat run through a grinder looks pretty much like what you see in the photo. Only the color changes, depending on the particular kind of meat being ground. Wake up people.That’s what happens when an animal is butchered. If it disgusts you, go vegetarian. No, I’m not a vegetarian. I’m happily chomping on barbecued ribs as I read and write. However, seeing what happens as animals are slaughtered and processed does make me feel a bit squeemish.

Personally I don’t think its that bad, would you rather waste all that meat and kill more animals, and like another person said that’s what processed meat is, did you think that your hot dog was a particular cut of meat??

Whatever they’re doing, it’s delicious.

I’d like to know what percentage of squeamish little girls that thought this was disgusting has ever skinned an animal or gutted a fish. Or pulled an apple from a tree, for chrissake. It all comes from somewhere, Dorothy.

@Just Kelly

That’t actually one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever heard of.

Is this really chicken? I find it hard to believe that they would put it straight into a cardboard box without any lining. Off to the side there is a box of this stuff stacked on another box. I don’t think they could put it so close to the ground. There are health regulations. I don’t know what this picture is.

The color in this picture has definitely been altered to give the gross effect that it is intended to do. Although, I do agree that this is probably not what the caption says it is, or this is in another country other than the US of A. I agree with the other folks in this feed that this is just the same as eating close to the bone. Nothing wrong with it, especially if this is the first phase of production. What you really need to be worried about is the additives and junk that is included after the fact. I eat only grass fed beef and bison, free-range chickens and turkeys from a farm near by. I know what I am getting, but I do pay more for it. It does cost more to do things correctly. If everyone would stop buying the packaged junk and pay a little more for the natural foods, we may, and I say that reluctantly, may bring the food giants to their knees…. yea right, who am I kidding!

@ Mickey Mouse, Alicia, Peggy Vegosen, Fanny Bonney, Sheila, etc…

It’s been said before, but we all need to grow up. Meat is never “pretty” before it’s cooked. Just because it doesn’t have that nice dark burgundy “natural” color of the beef cuts in you supermarket deli, doesn’t mean it’s filled with toxins, bacteria, government chemicals, etc. This is simply bits of chicken (yes, the same bits we eat in our seared chicken fillets) that are too difficult to separate by knife. So they have a water jet do it instead. It turns bright pink because that’s what chicken meat looks like… pink.

Nothing is wrong with using as much of the chicken as we can. It cuts down on cost and waste. That translates to a reduction in the number of chickens we have to slaughter to satisfy our need for buffalo chicken jerky. Also means less energy, food, and fertilizers used in our chicken farms.

This paste, as unappetizing as it looks, is a beautiful thing!

Really, it’s the salt and hydrolyzed soy that poses the real health risks in our processed chicken food.

I would like you to explain to me how I am supose to make hotdogs at home? Why not buy 100% beef hotdogs- since beef can’t be processed this way then I guess it works out.

Do I sense a very special ingredient for a future episode of, “Iron Chef”….? Or is it just me….?

Thank you for helping me gross out my kids! I have been switching our family over to a clean organic diet and now my kids are no longer interested in hot dogs and nuggets!!!! All it takes is a little knowledge and people would no longer be interested in this processed garbage!

i actually thought this was marshmallow!!!yuck!

Most of the response to this typify a society of sissies, insulated from the realities of life and rendered squeamish when exposed to a common method of food processing. As one poster said, this is no different in substance than picking meat off the bone.

I expect peaceniks and vegans who have softened our society to the point of weak decadence and acquiescence to terrorists to be grossed out by this and respond with their hippie mythology (“mmmm, soylent pink”).

But I am saddened to see an otherwise solid right winger post this on Twitter.

Nothing inherently toxic about this process. Just a way to get the most meat from the bird. Should we instead send the wasted food into the water or landfills?

I mean, I’m a big proponent of “use the whole animal”, but the pinkness is seriously creeping me out. Is that photo colour-adjusted, or is the meat colour-adjusted?

This is v cool

Am hungry now ppl are so naive to think that processed foods .. er .. aren’t processed .. Its all meat, as the article says, it takes the meat off the bone .. I guarentee you, those who are complaining about this would quite happily make a stock out of bones, its all the same

stop eating meat guys. think of the future.

It’s just meat, people. We’ve just become better at separating it from the chicken.

Anyone got a hotdog, i’m starving!

seriously, gimmie a bowl of that stuff.

Best way to avoid disgusting stuff like this???

GO VEGAN. SAVE AN ANIMAL. SAVE THE EARTH. SAVE YOURSELF!!!

@V
Well said!

I’ve never seen so many people overreact over something as trivial as this. OMG, it doesn’t look appetizing! It’s for hot dogs and bologna; cool it. You should consider yourselves lucky to not have been born during a god damned famine.

That looks tasty. In my mind, it tastes like bubblegum. In reality, probably less so.

While I do agree that we should be using all the meat we can, I don’t agree on the health benefits of this. Our digestive system is not designed to process this already processed garbage. Why can’t they boil the bones and sell real stock? I am also doubtful that this happens on small free range farms and I am against the consumption of caged hens and by-products.
On another note I do agree that our society has closed eyes when it comes to how meat goes from a farm to our plates. Yes this looks disgusting but that is not why I won’t eat it.

Want more? Watch a movie called FOOD, INC. It’s not about some of the terrible things that can happen at some farms like some PETA push. It’s about food production in this country. You’ll want to buy that plot of land, raise your own animals and grow your own food, that’s for sure.

this is so disgusting. you all need to watch “Food, Inc.” It is such a great movie because it shows you what really is in the food you eat. Go check it out!