If I were asked why McDonald’s food tastes so good, I’d say a meticulously-perfected balance of fat, salt, and sugar. Little did I know that the actual answer is far more obvious.
We make it the way you would.
Well, that’s good. I suppose. Although, arguably, the whole reason I’m going out to eat is because you’ll make it better than I would. Or, perhaps you’ll make it worse, but the convenience of having someone else do it will offset that. But okay, bold idea: make it the way I would. I like it.
With 100% beef.
Ok, now here I was surprised, because it hadn’t occurred to me that anything except beef really could go into a hamburger. I mean, I’ve heard about the trace amounts of rat droppings and cockroach parts, but that hardly counts. No McDonalds’ bag has ever said, “Hamburger: Now With Roach Carcass.” Then Issa told me that McDonalds’ hamburger patties actually didn’t used to be 100% beef. They had soy, or something, in them.
So, shocker. The big marketing push for how awesome McDonalds’ burgers are is that they… drum roll… are made from cow. Can you hear the dripping sarcasm? I mean, isn’t that the least we can expect? This is kind of like a dry-cleaner saying, “I did not put any new stains on your clothes. AREN’T I AWESOME!”
Especially since pink slime (ammonia-treated slaughter-house-floor-scrapings) counts as 100% beef. And pink slime is in McDonalds’ hamburgers! Yeah. I have to tell you, every time I make a hamburger, I scrape up some fatty bits from my slaughter house, grind them up, treat them with ammonia, and mix them in with the chuck. Way to “make it the way I would,” McDonalds.
#1 by Issa at March 6th, 2010
Hahaha. This is angry-making, and you made me laugh at the same time. Your dripping sarcasm is right on point here.
#2 by Kaz at March 10th, 2010
Actually, Issa is an Unreliable Source.
You need to verify that McD’s actually ever included soy.
I am fairly certain that, in fact, their point is that some other companies include additives, not that McD’s has stopped doing so.
It’s not like it says “NOW containing 100% beef”, the way Hot Pockets started saying “now with REAL cheese”, my first notification that they’d quietly started using fake cheese a few years back, explaining why the flavor declined in quality.
#3 by Joshua Bardwell at March 10th, 2010
Sorry. I should have been more clear that I wasn’t actually making that claim. I think my point stands, regardless of whether McD ever had non-beef adulterants in their burgers: what the heck else would you expect to find in a burger other than beef?!
Okay, I hear French Onion Dip is pretty good.
Me, I’m pretty sure it’s just the old, “Contains No Arsenic,” marketing gimmick, where you tout a claim that has always been true as if it’s some kind of achievement.
EDIT: Oh, and then there’s the pink slime. Regardless of how factually true the “100% beef” claim is, I think it’s intentionally misleading. When someone says, “Yes. McDonald’s hamburgers are made with 100% beef – no additives or fillers,” (direct quote from McD’s site), I think that people would be surprised to hear that includes ammonia-treated slaughterhouse-floor-leavings.
#4 by Issa at March 11th, 2010
“Actually, Issa is an Unreliable Source. You need to verify that McD’s actually ever included soy.”
Looking around the web a bit, it appears that the “soy in McD’s hamburgers” thing is a complete rumor. It’s not as strange as some of the rumors out there about their meat, but there ya go.
I remember noticing, probably in the early 90s, that McDonald’s hamburger patties had these strange little round, smooth things in amongst the rest of the hamburger-textured patty. It was explained to me that the reason for this was that it wasn’t all beef, but had soy in it, which I believed. Now that it seems that other ingredients aren’t the answer, I’m wondering what caused those weird little shapes?!