steve, I'm impressed and feel compelled to share my similar pride in never having been to Las Vegas despite traveling the world. A lot of parallels betweent the two I think.

I'm now in full procrastination mode. Post anything on this chain and I guarantee a speedy reply.

auxen1 wrote:is that ingredient list up to date....do they still use partially hydrogenated vegetable oil?

Excellent catch - it seems I'd found an out-of-date ingredient list. I updated the list in the original comment.

Now I'm wondering if the Ore-Ida list is out of date also. I can't seem to find ingredients on Ore-Ida's or Heinz's websites, so I'll take a look at the back of a package the next time I'm at a grocery store.

Khaopaat wrote:

KSeecs wrote:after seeing the miraculous freshness of their fries in the Super Size Me documentary I have to wonder at the healthiness of the level of preservatives and sodium their food contains.

You are aware, I assume, that just about any place that serves frozen fries (I'm betting a majority of this city's hot dog stands, Italian beef shops, etc. fit into this category) serves an almost identical product? If you were to fry up some Ore-Ida® Golden Fries® at home, and then place one behind the couch or in that narrow, hard-to-reach spot between the driver's seat & the door sill of your car, it would probably age just as gracefully as a McDonald's fry.

In fact, here are the almost-identical (and equally scary) lists of ingredients for comparison:

McDonald's French Fries
Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor, citric acid), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate, salt

Ore-Ida Golden Fries
Potatoes, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean and/or canola), salt, dextrose, disodium dihydrogen, pyrophosphate, annatto (vegetable color)

I'm not arguing with you, of course, that McDonald's fries are a far cry from being a "whole food", and that as far as ideas go, steering kids away from McDonald's as much as possible isn't a bad one. All I'm saying is that McDonald's products aren't all that different from many things that aren't deemed to be as bad, only because McDonald's gets the most attention/scrutiny.

Edited to update McDonald's fry ingredients

I don't doubt you are correct there, I surely didn't mean to suggest that McDonald's is alone in perpetrating zombie fries on the world, but the indestructibleness of those fries in that silly documentary always pops in to my head when someone suggest dining at McDonalds.

stevez wrote:Why in the Wide World of Sports anyone in Chicago patronizes places like that with the bounty of other, better choices available to them is beyond me.

My observation thus far in life has been that most people don't like other folks dictating or suggesting what they can and can't do. Choice. It's all about choice - and what's fantastic food to one person will be the opposite to someone else. It's not really so difficult to understand - once people accept the concept of letting others do/eat what they want to.

I could pick through prior discussions on LTH about restaurants popularized here - some of which have been closed for filthy conditions or which food I consider to be sub-par - and question the sanity of those folks for eating there. I don't, however - because I respect the right of others and their opinions to exercise a freedom of choice.

KSeecs wrote:I surely didn't mean to suggest that McDonald's is alone in perpetrating zombie fries on the world

I do believe I have a new nickname for them now. Thanks!

Bill wrote:
My observation thus far in life has been that most people don't like other folks dictating or suggesting what they can and can't do. Choice. It's all about choice - and what's fantastic food to one person will be the opposite to someone else. It's not really so difficult to understand - once people accept the concept of letting others do/eat what they want to.

I could pick through prior discussions on LTH about restaurants popularized here - some of which have been closed for filthy conditions or which food I consider to be sub-par - and question the sanity of those folks for eating there. I don't, however - because I respect the right of others and their opinions to exercise a freedom of choice.

Enjoy your Big Mac!

"My observation thus far in life has been that most people don't like other folks dictating or suggesting what they can and can't do. Choice. It's all about choice - and what's fantastic food to one person will be the opposite to someone else. It's not really so difficult to understand - once people accept the concept of letting others do/eat what they want to."

....a perfectly legitimate comment and sentiment that I hope my salad eating wife is reading right now

auxen1 wrote:....a perfectly legitimate comment and sentiment that I hope my salad eating wife is reading right now

Speaking of...

KSeecs wrote:[and after seeing the miraculous freshness of their fries in the Super Size Me documentary I have to wonder at the healthiness of the level of preservatives and sodium their food contains.

This, along with a comment a family member recently made that she had not eaten at McDonald's even once ever since she saw "Supersize Me," suggests to me another hypothesis.

I've not seen it, so I don't know how much it is about fast food itself, and how much is about fast food in excess (the "supersizing" factor). I myself don't have a very big appetite, so I can usually be satisfied with a fish sandwich or cheeseburger and a milk, and those don't seem so evil to me.

Bill wrote: My observation thus far in life has been that most people don't like other folks dictating or suggesting what they can and can't do. Choice. It's all about choice - and what's fantastic food to one person will be the opposite to someone else. It's not really so difficult to understand - once people accept the concept of letting others do/eat what they want to.

I personally could care less if people stuff themselves with Big Macs morning and night and with some 13,000 restaurant serving said Big Mac in pretty much the exact same way, it is not like anyone is taking away yours or anyone else's opportunity to do so. And no, they are not evil and yes they are a fast affordable factory of food, but let's not talk of choice, because the choice is yours for sure.

The fact of the matter is that McDonalds is one of the few business thriving in this recession so it is most likely that your choice will continue to expand and grow along with the average American child's waistline.

JP1121 wrote:

Bill wrote: My observation thus far in life has been that most people don't like other folks dictating or suggesting what they can and can't do. Choice. It's all about choice - and what's fantastic food to one person will be the opposite to someone else. It's not really so difficult to understand - once people accept the concept of letting others do/eat what they want to.

I personally could care less if people stuff themselves with Big Macs morning and night and with some 13,000 restaurant serving said Big Mac in pretty much the exact same way, it is not like anyone is taking away yours or anyone else's opportunity to do so. And no, they are not evil and yes they are a fast affordable factory of food, but let's not talk of choice, because the choice is yours for sure.

The fact of the matter is that McDonalds is one of the few business thriving in this recession so it is most likely that your choice will continue to expand and grow along with the average American child's waistline.

I think McDonalds markets the illusion of choice. You can have the same basic 1/4 pound burger 6 different ways, the same processed chicken 4 different ways, and with each and every "choice" come the economic hit that penalizes you if you do not add on the fries and coke. You are $6 to them, walking in the door. It does not matter to them at all how you spend the $6, how you subjectively experience your "choice". In the Jewel, there are aisles of crappy overpriced produce. Great variety of crap nobody should have to choose, or experience as "choice".
That's how I see McDonalds.

Furthermore, I think it is insane to assert their raw materials are somehow high quality. If you snuck a 1/4 pounder into someone's Kuma burger, they'd know the difference. If you walked across the street from the McDonalds on Clark, entered Aloha Cafe and swapped a filet-o-fish for the mah mahi fishburger there, the customer would notice. Go down to Leon's on the southside and give somebody a McRib instead of their order and see what happens. I mean wtf are you talking about, the lettuce being as good as lettuce everywhere?

I will grant you this much: in the past couple of decades McDonalds has gotten *slightly* better. I remember the days of scanning the heat bins to see what they had ready, because you'd wait forever if you wanted something freshmade or slightly altered. So, I feel ok about eating there precisely *when I have no other choice*. The same is not true of Burger King or Wendy's or Arby's or KFC---any Yum brand. I feel they have tumbled drastically beneath the threshold of even being minimally acceptable. I grew up on that stuff, in a far-off suburb where we literally had no other choices besides fast foods. I am grateful everytime I start chewing in Chicago for the immense, real food choices. I am the latchkey demographic that was raised on the fast stuff and should crave it for nostalgia and comfort alone. And I am telling you, the current fast food experiences, service and quality of food, bear little resemblance to the quality of even the recent past. It is as if they gradually replaced the food substances with chewable, addictive hormonal drugs designed to make you gain lots more storage space to put larger portions of their products.

Marco wrote:Furthermore, I think it is insane to assert their raw materials are somehow high quality. If you snuck a 1/4 pounder into someone's Kuma burger, they'd know the difference. If you walked across the street from the McDonalds on Clark, entered Aloha Cafe and swapped a filet-o-fish for the mah mahi fishburger there, the customer would notice. Go down to Leon's on the southside and give somebody a McRib instead of their order and see what happens. I mean wtf are you talking about, the lettuce being as good as lettuce everywhere?

Actually, iirc from Fast Food Nation, McDonald's unmatched ordering power allows them to require their suppliers to adhere to certain practices and meet certain standards that are not otherwise met for grocery stores and your typical eatery, particularly when it comes to slaughterhouses/meatpacking. That doesn't mean what they order is going to be higher quality beef than what the folks at Vie are sourcing from a good, local supplier, but this was possibly the only area where McDonald's actually came across quite positively in that book.

Marco wrote:Furthermore, I think it is insane to assert their raw materials are somehow high quality. If you snuck a 1/4 pounder into someone's Kuma burger, they'd know the difference. If you walked across the street from the McDonalds on Clark, entered Aloha Cafe and swapped a filet-o-fish for the mah mahi fishburger there, the customer would notice. Go down to Leon's on the southside and give somebody a McRib instead of their order and see what happens. I mean wtf are you talking about, the lettuce being as good as lettuce everywhere?

I recommend that you read this article, or at the very least the first paragraph:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_(business)

Specifically, this part:

The Wikipedia article on Quality (business), which is easily verified with some Google searching wrote:Consumers may focus on the specification quality of a product/service, or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace. Producers might measure the conformance quality, or degree to which the product/service was produced correctly.

With that in mind, you might want to reread the following posts that reference quality, as I feel that knowing the above definitions will make them sound a lot more sane:

auxen1 wrote:Bill, I don't think that its possible to have higher quality ingredients than McD's. Their product stewardship is unmatched.

When I use the word "quality" I'm thinking foremost about freshness, safety, testing, etc. And so I would rate the quality of their ingredients such as lettuce and beef as higher than, say, than what might be used at a Charlie Trotters (to pick an extreme example).

Someone not terribly focused on stewardship of lettuce production but very focused on taste....and puts taste ahead of safety when defining quality....would likely disagree.

But while McD's ingredients are of the highest quality, what the cook does with those ingredients makes all the difference in the world. McD's has defined fast food in this country and many parts of the world but it's just not a place I'm going to encourage anyone to go to.

(Emphasis mine)

Bill wrote:Some of the GNRs aren't going to offer you much, if any, different or improved quality in product than McDonalds and some of the other franchises will. Some of the quality requirements placed on suppliers of the franchisers will I've no doubt be higher than what many independent operations maintain/seek-out.

Mike G wrote:McD's...delivers a consistent level of quality (personally I think the relative gap between the best McDonald's and the worst is far smaller than between comparable burger chain outlets)

No one is saying that McDonald's is tastier than Kuma's or Aloha Grill in any way. They're just saying that McDonald's quality control is among the best in the business world. Quality ≠ Tasty. These are two separate concepts. Sure, it would be preferable to have food products that are both high quality and tasty, but that's outside the scope of what all of the above-quoted folks were saying.

I dont know if I would call McDonalds ingredients quality(I have doubts about what they pass off as "beef", "pork" and "chicken"). I guess lips, hooves, rectums, beaks, etc, could be passed off as meat.

I think McDonalds strives for uniformity vs quality imho.

jimswside wrote:I dont know if I would call McDonalds ingredients quality(I have doubts about what they pass off as "beef", "pork" and "chicken"). I guess lips, hooves, rectums, beaks, etc, could be passed off as meat.

I think McDonalds strives for uniformity vs quality imho.

But that's just the thing: if a company's product specifications call for lips, hooves, rectums, beaks, etc. in certain ratios, and those products are all produced identically using lips, hooves, rectums, beaks, etc. from suppliers who consistently meet the company's specifications, then this is, according to the business world's definition, a high-quality product.

Now if some prime ground chuck were to accidentally get mixed into the lips, hooves, rectums, beaks, etc., then that batch would fail quality control because it did not meet the specifications set forth for that product.

Their meat is the same as you get at Jewels. Trust me, I walked through one of their plants and saw it with my own eyes.

teatpuller wrote:Their meat is the same as you get at Jewels. Trust me, I walked through one of their plants and saw it with my own eyes.

Thats not really high praise, I dont buy meat at Jewel either.

Khaopaat nailed the quality issue, IMO.

(I have doubts about what they pass off as "beef", "pork" and "chicken"). I guess lips, hooves, rectums, beaks, etc, could be passed off as meat.

Jim, what you're suggesting above just isn't true. Dig a little and you'll find that McD's takes the finest cuts for their customers and sends the rest of the animal elsewhere (oftentimes to thirdworld markets who like to eat what we do not).

McD's takes really good and fresh beef and then grinds it too fine and adds a bit too much sodium then freezes the product. Whereas a Patty's or a Beefburgers (that's Top Notch to LTH'rs) access roughly the same quality beef, same mix of fat and lean....but the grind is completely different, sodium application different, never frozen and completely different cooking method and presentation.

Does McD's ground beef mix still include dairy cows? Or is it all steer now?

Ed, My understanding is that all ground beef in the U.S. incorporates some percentage of dairy cows. When the cows are older (10+ years) and taken out of production they are made into hamburger and luggage. Hamburger is a mix of lean beef and fatty beef and the steer meat has to be "leaned up," that's what the dairy cows are used for. Grass fed beef is also sold as lean. When there's not enough grass fed and dairy cows for hamburber we import lean beef from primarily Australia which is grass fed to make our burgers. Milk prices push the U.S. dairy cow population up and down so we go through cycles when lean animals are plentiful domestically and times when they are not.

This describes industrial U.S. hamburger production and I believe can be safely extended to McD's and Walmart who are the two largest buyers of U.S. beef (rough and tough 20% of all beef produced in the U.S.).

gleam wrote:Does McD's ground beef mix still include dairy cows? Or is it all steer now?

Large corporations such as McDonald's buy trimmings from the large packing houses and grind them up. They almost assuredly have some dairy cows mixed in there. Anything sourced from the large food service suppliers is going to be the same thing. Do you frequent any restaurants that use Sysco?

auxen1 wrote:Ed, My understanding is that all ground beef in the U.S. incorporates some percentage of dairy cows. When the cows are older (10+ years) and taken out of production they are made into hamburger and luggage. Hamburger is a mix of lean beef and fatty beef and the steer meat has to be "leaned up," that's what the dairy cows are used for. Grass fed beef is also sold as lean. When there's not enough grass fed and dairy cows for hamburber we import lean beef from primarily Australia which is grass fed to make our burgers. Milk prices push the U.S. dairy cow population up and down so we go through cycles when lean animals are plentiful domestically and times when they are not.

The average age of a cull dairy cow is usually about 4-5. In commercial production, a dairy cow of 10 years is extremely rare.

Dairy cows tend to be leaner, but this is not necessarily the case, it depends on the cow's health and reproductive status. They are processed more or less the same as "beef" cattle.....the best cuts are not ground up.

The average age of a cull dairy cow is usually about 4-5. In commercial production, a dairy cow of 10 years is extremely rare.

I would have been better advised to say "older" versus giving a year. 4-9 years captures that vast majority of culled cows. Agree that 10+ is rare.

Dairy cows tend to be leaner, but this is not necessarily the case, it depends on the cow's health and reproductive status. They are processed more or less the same as "beef" cattle.....the best cuts are not ground up.

From McD's..."the decision to import was prompted by a shortage of lean beef in the U.S. He said consumer demand for lean ground beef has escalated, just as the number of cull cows--the primary source of ground beef--has declined"

Teat, this doesn't refute what you've written and the market dynamics are more complex than can be captured here. In all liklihood, lean beef is imported as a market strategy to drive down price.

auxen1 wrote:Ed, My understanding is that all ground beef in the U.S. incorporates some percentage of dairy cows.

You mean when I go to a butcher and have them grind chuck for me then and there, it's incorporating some percentage of dairy cows?

It seems absurd to say that all ground beef incorporates some percentage of dairy cows. Plenty of ground beef doesn't. Even if you're talking mass-produced ground beef, I seriously doubt all of it has dairy cows.

I'm not saying dairy cows are necessarily bad (although, do they have much flavor?), just curious.

Nationally, dairy cattle make up 5-10% of all beef supply. Given that we are right next to Wisconsin (second largest dairy state), I'm sure that number is a lot higher for Chicagoland.

Any mass produced ground beef, which comes from the trimmings of thousands of cattle, is going to have some dairy cows in it.

If you go to your neighborhood butcher and ask him to grind some certified angus for you, then no, that ground beef would not have dairy cows in it.

You mean when I go to a butcher and have them grind chuck for me then and there, it's incorporating some percentage of dairy cows?

It seems absurd to say that all ground beef incorporates some percentage of dairy cows. Plenty of ground beef doesn't. Even if you're talking mass-produced ground beef, I seriously doubt all of it has dairy cows.

I'm not saying dairy cows are necessarily bad (although, do they have much flavor?), just curious.

Going to a butcher versus going to Jewel's or Dominick's or Target I would venture reduces the chances.

I'll answer your assertion as follows. The U.S. dairy herd numbers more than 9 million. So you're culling more than a million head each year. I don't know the average weight but I'm going to venture 1,000 pounds. So you've got a million thousand pounds of stuff. Which is a billion pounds.

We consume rough and tough 30 pounds of ground beef per person (I consumer 60 and my wife 0). So 300 million american times 30 pounds per person equals 900 million pounds of ground beef.

A billion pounds of dead cows.

900 million pounds of ground beef demand.

Absurd?

Sorry, make that 9 billion pounds of ground beef demand.

auxen1 wrote:We consume rough and tough 30 pounds of ground beef per person

That seems a bit high for a weekly number. I'm going to assume you're talking about 30 lbs./month.

Sure, I have no doubt lots of dairy meat is going into the mix, not just at McDonald's. But if Top Notch gets a giant slab of non-dairy beef and then grinds it themselves (which they do), do you really think this statement is fair?

McD's takes really good and fresh beef and then grinds it too fine and adds a bit too much sodium then freezes the product. Whereas a Patty's or a Beefburgers (that's Top Notch to LTH'rs) access roughly the same quality beef, same mix of fat and lean....but the grind is completely different, sodium application different, never frozen and completely different cooking method and presentation.

1. First, on the notion of quality and safety in fast food. I am granting that McDonald's has a replicable standard of *sameness* that is higher than other of the low-end fast food places. But that standard of sameness can't even match the overall quality of Wieners Circle. Perhaps the raw meat itself originated from the same proportion of animal tissue. Who cares. The product presented to me is worse. The bun, the cheese, the sugar, the salt, the frozen hockey puck itself--- the gestalt is worse. Why does the double cheeseburger still report 1.5 grams of trans fat, where is that coming from? If the product is already "high quality", why bother introducing an Angus, higher quality, burger in the first place? I lived in Australia and went to McDonald's there, and it was much higher quality beef. A much better product. It was *different*. I think the discussion here is conflating industrial *sameness* with quality.

2. Certainly Burger King has utterly jumped the shark. They used to have 3 different grades of beef available to their stores; if you found one, usually in a nice suburb, that used the top end meat it was pretty good. The meat product presented today is hardly even recognizable to me as BK. And if you are sticking that product slathered with mayo into a high powered microwave, you've lost my willingness to suffer the consequences. At this point, Wieners Circle, a simple patty sitting on a grill, is vastly superior in quality.

3. It may be that the notion of quality from the point of view of the producer is radically at odds from that of the consumer. McDonald's producers claim the product is increasing in quality, yet nearly everyone who speaks about McDonald's these days remarks upon how the product seems inferior: smaller, more tasteless, more of a rip-off. What accounts for that gap?