Never Eating McNuggets Again

OK, so I finally saw Super Size Me today, on its last day at City Cinema. Despite the fact that PEI is officially the fattest province in Canada, every last person in the theatre was thin to normal sized. I don't think the right people might be getting the message. And it's a pretty powerful one, to say the least. The tone of voice of the doctor near the end who was telling him that his liver was in the same condition as a binge-drinking alcoholic sounded as if he was delivering the bad news to a terminal cancer patient.

As I've said before, I have less of a problem with McDonald's existing, nor do I have a problem with anyone making money off of others' ignorance or laziness. It's the advertizing to kids that really bothers me. One of the tidbits from the film was that if you fed your kid three meals a day all throughout their childhood, and told him or her all about the nutritional value of what he or she is eating, you would be giving them about 1000 messages in a year. During that same time they will have seen, on average, 10,000 advertizements for fast food, candy and sugary cereal. So my contention that advertizing is child abuse is reinforced.

The guy gained about 28 pounds during the month he was on the McDonald's-only diet, just under a pound per day. Now while that's for an average person's rate of metabolizing fat, there's still the matter of the 48 teaspoons of sugar in a single super-sized Coke (American size, Canadian sizes are slightly smaller. Small comfort.) , which will wreak havoc on your liver and your ability to keep a properly-regulated energy level through the day. Also, a study, put out after this film, shows that people who drink one can of cola per day on average have their chances of contracting diabetes increase by 85%. So even if you can't see the damage, it's going to be there.

Being a poor grad student for a couple of years ingrained in me the idea that I simply can't afford to eat out that often, and when I did I certainly didn't want to waste it on fast food. So I think poverty has adequately weaned me off of the desire to stuff that garbage into me. Will have to keep up my cooking now that I'm working, which will need to be a conscious effort, most likely. I wish I knew someone who liked spicy food as much as I do whom I could cook for. That always motivates me to cook well and put a little more effort into my cooking.

As for the title of this post, mcnuggets are made by a process called ‘mechanical separation,’ where the chicken, after being stripped of more usable meat, is thrown into a blender and forced through a sieve so that the ‘meat‘ and bones are turned into a fine powder. Then most of the bone material is sifted out, and what's left is a paste that can be molded into mcnugget shapes, or flattened out to make sandwich meat. There's also a danger that this method increases the risk of mad cow disease and has now been banned by the European Union.

Now I'm still not going to become a total vegetarian, since a little bit of something isn't the problem. But knowing how your food is made definitely makes you think twice about what you're putting into yourself. His promise to, if he ever has a kid, to punch him in the face every time they go past a fast food restaurant to counteract the positive feeling advertizing instills, seems like not a half bad idea in balance. At least until the little guy learns.