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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3855 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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Meat. How do you know you're getting the good stuff and not some ultra-processed slop filled with cheap, rotting bits o' this and that?

It seems like this choice is a spectrum.

On one hand, you have the raw stuff: steak cuts, chicken thighs, pork chops, etc. Things that look like meat. Here, you can discern quality by figuring out the origin.

On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.

But what's in between? Like, if I buy ham at the store, how can I discern whether it falls more into the ultra-processed category or rather into the raw stuff category?

(I'm trying to be more systemic about my diet and part of the equation seems to be minimizing ultra-processed foods. This is easy with stuff like chips, sweets, soda, etc. but not so much with meat.)

Edit: My thanks for the excellent advice!

I just stopped buying processed meat at all. Sometimes miss corned beef, but it made me realize that the majority of processed meats were just a byproduct of needing to store it without freezers. Like sauerkraut for the fall cabbage crop.

Honestly I'm going off of packaged meat entirely the way the quality of chicken has been dropping. DIYing the whole thing has kinda spoiled me on store bought stuff.

the majority of processed meats were just a byproduct of needing to store it without freezers. Like sauerkraut for the fall cabbage crop.

Well yeah. But the reason for developing those techniques doesn't change that they make meat delicious.

Eh, I've kinda gone off the salt content of stuff like bacon. Although right after posting I had some great Italian sausages, which tasted better than anything I cooked with a pig from the same litter, so who knows.

Hey, if you don't like it by all means don't eat it. We all have things we don't like, after all. I'm just saying even though the techniques of curing/smoking meat have outlived the need for food preservation, doesn't mean we should by any means stop doing it.

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