Processed Meat Substitutes vs. Meat

You pick up two packages in the cooler section to make burgers: Beyond Beef meat substitute, and a pack of ground beef. Like any good shopper you look at the ingredients. Hmmm… there’s a lot in this Beyond Meat package. Isn’t plain ground beef more “whole food-ish?” There’s just one ingredient after all. Let’s look at all that’s in the Beyond Meat list:

Water, Pea Protein*, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Refined Coconut Oil, Rice Protein, Natural Flavors, Cocoa Butter, Mung Bean Protein, Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Extract, Salt, Potassium Chloride, Vinegar, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Sunflower Lecithin, Beet Juice Extract (for color).

What the heck in Methylcellulose? The rest sound good… but what to do…

 

Let’s dig a little deeper into the what’s really in the beef package:

• Meat from dozens of different cows put in the same grinder (unless you’re having the butcher ground a sirloin)
• Fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or nontoxin-producing E. coli)
• Man made steroids from implants placed in mass produced cows
• Other manmade concoctions given to beef cows include:
• • Growth-promoting drugs — which can include natural and synthetic versions of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone
  • Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH)— to promote milk production (may also see it as bovine somatotropin [BST])
  • Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1)
  • An array of antibiotics
  • Vaccines for blackleg, pinkeye, pasteurella, somnus, scours, tetanus, mastitis, salmonella, warts, footrot, and rabies, amongst others
  • Dewormers
  • Anhydrous ammonia 
  • Carbon Monoxide
  • Cetylpyridinium with propylene glycol
  • Aqueous solution of sodium octanoate, potassium octanoate or octanoic acid and either glycerin and/or propylene glycol and/or a Polysorbate surface active agent
  • Bacteriophages

This list only scratches the surface.

I’m no doctor, but I would think that some of this would concentrate in the cow’s muscles (meat) and settle into the person eating it. Is it worth the risk? 

Most factory farm conditions are pretty rough and animals need these drugs to barely survive. Many die on the factory floor. 

Recently I visited a free range cattle farm in rural Pennsylvania, and it was beautiful to see all the cows grazing, their little ones by their sides, the sun shining. I thought, “oh, well, this doesn’t look so bad.” Then I went to the feeding area where they keep the water so I can visit the ones in there and feed them some fresh green onions (it was not locked or gated at all), and, well, I nearly got sick.

The smell was overwhelming. They were half a foot deep in feces and they were defecating into hay from stacks that were spilling onto the floor. I suppose that’s why they need bleach to process the slaughtered cows, even in the “free range” conditions. No thanks. We also have to remember that most meat we buy at the store is not from cows like these, but one’s jammed in factory farms with conditions twenty times worse. 

Know that every day you make about 200 food decisions. That’s a lot. Make this one now to ditch meat, and feel good about it.