This follows on from something I remember from my time in HK whereby duck eggs in China were doctored with a carcinogenic dye.

I’ve mentioned fake food/medicine/supplements from China in my past blog: China may well solve global warming.. Kinda including:

• baby food that looked and smelled ok, but had zero nutritional content. Result: 50 to 60 dead kids who starved to death while the poor parents tried in vain to feed them with milk powder that was pretty much sawdust. (See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/health/main616432.shtml )
• Use of a carcinogenic red dye (called sudan red) in duck eggs because the redder the yolk, the more they can sell ‘em for (see http://french.hanban.edu.cn/english/health/189567.htm ) and also in sauce (http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/209080.htm)
• Fake medical supplies (see http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/08/content_10625425.htm and  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jul/05/china.internationalnews1 )

Food that’s “Made in China” is pretty scary
It really is a worry to be considering sending any food production toward China. The pollution in China is already ridiculous and getting worse. I wouldn’t trust anything coming out of there to not have lots of heavy metals and carcinogenic crap stuffed in it.

Chinese Oysters: Top quality ingredients!

I’ve already given up trying to get smoked oysters (a guilty scoff-a-whole-tin pleasure of mine) because the only ones in the shops now come from China and I don’t fancy eating the “filters of the sea” from one of the most polluted places on Earth.

Better off Ted: a step closer to "blobby" the meat blob.

In the article “Tuck into some soggy pork, straight from the lab” scientists have made the first draft of meat in a vat. We’ll take a leaf from Better off ted and nickname the lab grown meat “Blobby”. Blobby is a step closer to reality:

They have not tasted the product, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.

Mark Post, a professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, said: ”What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.

”This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”

I mean people buy (and allegedly eat) the amusing named meat substitutes like: fake bacon (“facon”?)..

Mmmn.. Real bacony goodness it ain't!

fake tuna (“tuno” I kid you not)..

Just say no. Tuno is not tuna.

fake sausages (affectionately known as “fagsnags”?) and even tofu turkey (tofurky).

Tofu made to look like Turkey. Apparently one of the most horrible creations ever according to a vego friend.

But some are still not satisfied:

However, the Vegetarian Society said: ”How could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered?”

Jesus some people are morons.

How do you know your organic carrot wasn’t used to stab a cute little bunny rabbit through the eye? Or your tofu used to smother kittens before it was stuck in the plastic wrapper? Or the organic tofu wasn’t created from soy beans grown on clear felled, slashed and burnt rainforest?
That’s right, you don’t magically know. But perhaps it is labelled as made in a lab vs “real” so you can tell and you have to trust that the standards are in place to ensure stuff isn’t mislabelled just like everything else. Just like Halal/Kosher are marked so that we know which meat came from cruelly-slaughtered-via-slit-throat-to-appease-barbaric-religious-beliefs animals vs non halal/kosher ones put down as quickly and painlessly as possible (don’t get me started on this concept!).

More likely people will largely ignore the ethical qualities would want to have non-grown in the lab stuff and there’ll be a push to give consumers the information about whether it was from a cow/pig/chook or from a lab. So perhaps for a while there there’ll be people buying burgers that have lab grown stuff snuck in there (thus an “all beef patty with extra ethics”) but isn’t it better regardless that SOME of the content not be from slaughtered animals? Let’s say you could cut down the actual slaughter count for McDonalds to half current numbers? Isn’t that a good thing?

And that old crackpot Prince Charles:

The breakthrough will concern the anti-GM lobby. Prince Charles, a fierce opponent of genetically modified food, said last week that people were creating problems by ”treating food as an easy commodity rather than a precious gift from nature”.

Believes in some good stuff, but a load of garbage (homoeopathy for instance). Take any statement with a spoonful of highly diluted tincture of crap.

I suppose he’d know about easy commodities, being the leftover of the inbred concept of royalty who are born and instantly gifted with a taxpayer funded (previously serf served) life of.. well.. royalty.
Yes, food is an easy commodity: that’s part of the way we’ve come to drag ourselves out of constantly foraging/hunting/preparing food enough to support pale, white collar professions that revolve around arranging bytes on computers into ever more complicated ways.

Anyhow, there are a number of advantages I think of separating out the “meat” from the rest of the cow. Parasitic infections (e.g. ticks/lice/worms), unintended contamination (e.g. cow drinks glowing green nuclear waste but doesn’t get super-cow powers or perhaps gets treated/dipped with something nasty) could be kept under control better when the stuff is just raw inputs into a big conveyor belt in a lab type set-up.

Chemicals/nutrients in.. Meat out. Just without the having to kill something in between.

Anyhow if this grown in a lab version means we can dispense with piling as many animals in stinking cages their whole, short, miserable lives: then I’m all for it.

Well, that’s not completely accurate, but it is roughly along the lines of “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” in which the dilemma for vegetarians is solved by genetically engineering a creature who wants to be eaten or else feels pain.

In this NewScientist article: “Pain free animals could take suffering out of farming” there’s some discussion of how various findings could be used to lessen the discomfort of farmed animals. So not quite “animals that want to be eaten”, but animals that don’t so much care about pain.

I think the better solution is to step back from the ultra-packed in “factory farming” that seems to be the norm in the USA and parts of Europe and let the poor animals roam around a bit. I grew up in a rural area and I’d have to say any animals I came across appeared to have a pretty good existence:

• nice big open paddocks for the cows or long sheds for the chickens
• farmers keeping away predators and providing healthcare (sounds better than the deal most US citizens have currently)

With modern slaughtering techniques there’s an attempt to minimise the pain/discomfort at the end of the animal’s life, well, except for the barbaric Jewish and Muslim “halal” and “kosher” slaughter.
(Start religious rant)Those religious slaughter techniques are nearly as barbaric today as they were thousands of years back. Still not sure why animals have to continue to have their throats cut and bleed to death slowly today when they could just get the bolt gun to the head (as per the more humane “normal” slaughtering technique). All because some people think that their superstition needs extra suffering to appease some sky god.
(end rant)

I guess the ultimate would be growing meat in a vat though. I mean if it doesn’t have a brain or nervous system then it probably can’t really be in a state of pain as per any reasonable definition. Or perhaps we could reduce the number of farm animals via some sort of human recycling a la the movie “Soylent Green”.

Soylent green.. is PEOPLE!

After all if we’re going to say it’s ok to eat other animals, we should at least be fair about things right?

But let’s face it: if the 10 pints of cheap beer and chips (erm.. crisps!) the typical kebab shopper has consumed before they’ve suitably damaged their self preservation instinct to utter the drunken “Letsh get a kebab Ihm fukken starvin’” haven’t damaged your health: a kebab with nasty stuff isn’t going to make much difference.

While most were clean, five per cent were discovered to be a potential health risk from salmonella, E.coli, staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus spp.

Given that the article talks of how a greasy kebab contains almost the entire day’s calorie intake for a woman it’s probably best if it does just pass right on through you via food poisoning.

Tips on how to statistically improve your chances of a squirt free kebab:

The researchers found that cucumber, which is handled for chopping, was most likely to be contaminated. Chilli sauce was the biggest risk of the various sauces.

For the Muslims/Jews with their ridiculous pork phobia, it’s quite likely a bunch of them are going to hell:

Also, a number of kebabs do not include the meat claimed.  Some sold as Halal and so suitable for Muslims were even found to contain pork, which is banned by the faith.

Given there’s no way to tell if beef is Halal other than if you know it has suffered more by bleeding to death (thousands of years of progress and animals are still essentially sacrificed by throat slitting to appease religion): I’d say a good portion of that would be just whatever beef they could buy cheaply, and thus another ticket to hell.

What makes a good Kebab?

Kebabs for me are like Indian food: it’s not really the taste that’s most important.

What truly matters is if you don’t get sick.

If your stomach doesn’t complain then it’s good. If you have a few stomach gurgles the next day then it’s “okay”. If you eat there a handful of times and your friends who have eaten there also have not been sick AND it tastes ok then it qualifies as a “great kebab”.

That’s really the only criteria that matters with any food that’s traditionally associated with liquefying your insides for days on end. It goes into your stomach already looking like vomit and occasionally comes back up looking the same. Thankfully I battle hardened my stomach in HK and tend to survive dodgy food pretty well. For those who haven’t gone through the bouts of 3-4 days of hellish food poisoning it takes to get a cast iron stomach kebabs are a potential landmine. So the more used to bad food your stomach is: the wider the range of “good kebab shops” there are.

Now I’m sure everyone’s got a “oh but I know a great kebab place”. Sure, when you stumbled there last time you were drunk and the sweaty looking guy managed to slice some half cooked substandard meat resembling spam off an inadequate cooking device and squirt the flavour out of a big squeezy bottle over some chopped tomato and parsley without wiping his nose while you were there: great. Such chef level skill required!

They all generally taste good because there’s typically enough grease in the meat for it to taste good regardless. Case in point: if you let the “juice” (e.g. fat, grease, sauce mix) soak into the wrapping too much you tend to find you’ve started to eat it (sometimes even the aluminium foil). Is it variety that might make a good kebab? Not likely! The thought of offering something “exotic” like sour cream, or avocado is enough to trigger many a dodgy kebab shop a small grease induced heart attack.

What really matters is how well they cleaned their hands, how many years old the meat was (see below for a German story on that!) and how long the stuff’s been sitting there. It shouldn’t matter, but that’s how it works currently.

The dodgy Kebab in the News past

Some other great kebab triumphs:

• 160 people get food poisoning from one Kebab shop
• Aussie snooker ace struggles after bad kebab
• A dodgy kebab turns out to be a baby
• 150 tons of spoiled 4 year old frozen meat thawed out and sold to dodgy kebab makers in Germany

But..

All that said, they do pack a good grease hit and who says you want something healthy after alcohol anyhow? Find one that doesn’t result in the squirts the next day and you’ve got yourself a “good dodgy kebab place”.