9/17/07
There are seemingly endless reasons to hate the Wal-Mart Corporation. I could probably do an entire series on the slew of evil practices in which the largest company in the world engages. Not since the roaring days of the African slave trade has the world seen such unfair and rampant distain for common workers, whether it’s the fact that managers illegally adjust overtime off of an employee’s timecard onto the next week, or the fact that Wal-Mart counted 28 hours per week as “full-time,” or the fact that, in an effort to squeeze every delicious drop of profit at the expense of human decency, Wal-Mart has installed a rolling work hours where employees are just sort of “on call” 24 hours a day with no set schedule. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Wal-Mart offered a health care plan so staggeringly expensive that they knew employees wouldn’t be able to afford it, and then encouraged them to go on welfare and Medicaid instead, effectively passing off responsibility to the US government. And, of course, there’s the fact that Wal-Mart gets huge subsidies from local government to come into a town and drive all small business to bankruptcy with lower prices that are immediately raised after all competition has been killed. No, forget all that. Today I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: meat.
I enjoy cooking a great deal. Point of fact, other than booze pretty much all of my disposable income goes to food. Fortunately I’m a pretty good cook so my wife pretty much leaves me to my own devices where culinary decisions are involved. I think she would rather be blissfully unaware whenever I spend $6 on a single ounce of saffron, or $12.99 for a single, dry-aged steak. This information would just cause her mind to recoil in horror. But if you want quality, sometimes you just gotta pay for it. This is a principle with which Americans are terribly uncomfortable, which is why Wal-Mart is so popular. I will concede that it is terrifically convenient to get all your shopping done in one place, but at the end of the day all you’re left with is a little saved time and a cart-load of cheap crap. Shirts that dissolve immediately upon contact with water, lights that burn out if you’re so careless as to turn them on, pots and pans with the heat distribution properties of a moldy tangerine, and, well, moldy tangerines. This is not good stuff, dear readers. But the single most abominable sin against humanity Wal-Mart affects is what they have the unmitigated gall to call “meat.”
It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Long rows of brilliantly red beef of all cuts merrily sitting inside large plastic containers; what could be better? Well, not all cuts, since Wal-Mart no longer employs butchers in favor of pre-packaged meat imported from gods know where except that it’s not from American farmers. So you can’t get anything cut to order; what you see is what you get. But that’s just peanuts, here’s the butter: The reason the meat looks so good is because it’s treated with chemicals to retain that ruby-red color pretty much forever. It could be as spoiled as Paris Hilton beneath that taught plastic wrap but it would still look like it was cut this morning. They way this is accomplished is by using low-oxygen atmospheres and treating the meat with carbon monoxide. I know, it sounds delicious. That’s why the packaging is so puffed and tight like that; it’s a specific atmosphere inside the packaging necessary to keep it looking good. So essentially that ribeye could have sat in an unrefridgerated truck in Death Valley for a week, then delivered its payload to the store and you would never be able to tell the difference.
Wal-Mart claims that it doesn’t use CO2-treated meat anymore, but independent tests have shown that, as of last year at least, they were still selling meat treated by carbon monoxide. All of that aside, if you’ve ever tasted Wal-Mart meat, the point is really moot. I won’t say it has all the flavor and texture of a coconut husk, but it’s close. Yes, it is a little cheaper, but only by a very slim margin more than overshadowed by its similarity to shoe leather.
According to the company’s facts page, “We made the decision to expand our case-ready meat program to better serve our customers.” If anyone out there believes that, I have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you. They fired all their butchers (they were dangerously close to unionizing) and went to pre-packed, hermetically sealed foodstuffs because it’s fucking cheaper for them, period. They are also particularly terrified of letting you know where the meat comes from, heavily lobbying against country of origin labeling (COOL). Their reasoning here is that “COOL applies costs to the system and provides zero benefits to the consumer.” That’s according to an exec in an interview with Beef Magazine. Yeah, I don’t want to know where my meat comes from either. Are any of the cleaning crew mysteriously missing?
I’ve pretty much boycotted Wal-Mart for this and many, many other reasons. I’m not asking you to do the same, but in the interest of decent food, please consider a goddamn grocery store that at least has people who’ve touched the meat they’re selling. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.
Sources:
http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/CFA_Wal-Mart_CO_statement_5.16.06.pdf.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/14/122225/59
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4839.cfm
http://www.walmartfacts.com/articles/2462.aspx
There are seemingly endless reasons to hate the Wal-Mart Corporation. I could probably do an entire series on the slew of evil practices in which the largest company in the world engages. Not since the roaring days of the African slave trade has the world seen such unfair and rampant distain for common workers, whether it’s the fact that managers illegally adjust overtime off of an employee’s timecard onto the next week, or the fact that Wal-Mart counted 28 hours per week as “full-time,” or the fact that, in an effort to squeeze every delicious drop of profit at the expense of human decency, Wal-Mart has installed a rolling work hours where employees are just sort of “on call” 24 hours a day with no set schedule. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Wal-Mart offered a health care plan so staggeringly expensive that they knew employees wouldn’t be able to afford it, and then encouraged them to go on welfare and Medicaid instead, effectively passing off responsibility to the US government. And, of course, there’s the fact that Wal-Mart gets huge subsidies from local government to come into a town and drive all small business to bankruptcy with lower prices that are immediately raised after all competition has been killed. No, forget all that. Today I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: meat.
I enjoy cooking a great deal. Point of fact, other than booze pretty much all of my disposable income goes to food. Fortunately I’m a pretty good cook so my wife pretty much leaves me to my own devices where culinary decisions are involved. I think she would rather be blissfully unaware whenever I spend $6 on a single ounce of saffron, or $12.99 for a single, dry-aged steak. This information would just cause her mind to recoil in horror. But if you want quality, sometimes you just gotta pay for it. This is a principle with which Americans are terribly uncomfortable, which is why Wal-Mart is so popular. I will concede that it is terrifically convenient to get all your shopping done in one place, but at the end of the day all you’re left with is a little saved time and a cart-load of cheap crap. Shirts that dissolve immediately upon contact with water, lights that burn out if you’re so careless as to turn them on, pots and pans with the heat distribution properties of a moldy tangerine, and, well, moldy tangerines. This is not good stuff, dear readers. But the single most abominable sin against humanity Wal-Mart affects is what they have the unmitigated gall to call “meat.”It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Long rows of brilliantly red beef of all cuts merrily sitting inside large plastic containers; what could be better? Well, not all cuts, since Wal-Mart no longer employs butchers in favor of pre-packaged meat imported from gods know where except that it’s not from American farmers. So you can’t get anything cut to order; what you see is what you get. But that’s just peanuts, here’s the butter: The reason the meat looks so good is because it’s treated with chemicals to retain that ruby-red color pretty much forever. It could be as spoiled as Paris Hilton beneath that taught plastic wrap but it would still look like it was cut this morning. They way this is accomplished is by using low-oxygen atmospheres and treating the meat with carbon monoxide. I know, it sounds delicious. That’s why the packaging is so puffed and tight like that; it’s a specific atmosphere inside the packaging necessary to keep it looking good. So essentially that ribeye could have sat in an unrefridgerated truck in Death Valley for a week, then delivered its payload to the store and you would never be able to tell the difference.Wal-Mart claims that it doesn’t use CO2-treated meat anymore, but independent tests have shown that, as of last year at least, they were still selling meat treated by carbon monoxide. All of that aside, if you’ve ever tasted Wal-Mart meat, the point is really moot. I won’t say it has all the flavor and texture of a coconut husk, but it’s close. Yes, it is a little cheaper, but only by a very slim margin more than overshadowed by its similarity to shoe leather.
According to the company’s facts page, “We made the decision to expand our case-ready meat program to better serve our customers.” If anyone out there believes that, I have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you. They fired all their butchers (they were dangerously close to unionizing) and went to pre-packed, hermetically sealed foodstuffs because it’s fucking cheaper for them, period. They are also particularly terrified of letting you know where the meat comes from, heavily lobbying against country of origin labeling (COOL). Their reasoning here is that “COOL applies costs to the system and provides zero benefits to the consumer.” That’s according to an exec in an interview with Beef Magazine. Yeah, I don’t want to know where my meat comes from either. Are any of the cleaning crew mysteriously missing?I’ve pretty much boycotted Wal-Mart for this and many, many other reasons. I’m not asking you to do the same, but in the interest of decent food, please consider a goddamn grocery store that at least has people who’ve touched the meat they’re selling. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.
Sources:
http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/CFA_Wal-Mart_CO_statement_5.16.06.pdf.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/14/122225/59
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4839.cfm
http://www.walmartfacts.com/articles/2462.aspx
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