Meat is made out of meat, go figure…

Normally I love Gizmodo, but today they got a little sensationalist with this headline:  A Tour of McDonald’s Horrifying Mechanized Meat Factories.  Having read that, I expected to see some kind of undercover, covert video or pictures of some disgusting practice the popular fast-food chain conducts away from prying eyes, something likely to turn off even the most devoted fast-food devouring consumer.  Maybe McDonald’s throws entire live cows right into the grinding machine in the back room of every restaurant and makes strawberry milkshakes with the blood.  Morbidly fascinating, right?

Instead, they link to…a McDonald’s-produced public relations piece made to reassure consumers of the safety and quality of their meat.  Big surprise:  the video does exactly what it intends to do, and reassures consumers of the safety and quality of their meat!  Yes, it brings you inside a meat processing factory, but I fail to see what’s so “horrifying” about that.  I mean, did they think hamburgers grew on trees?  Maybe they were delivered by unicorns sliding down rainbows?  Shocker:  did you know we get hamburger from cows?  Meat is made of meat – someone alert the presses!

There is nary a “horrifying” scene in this video, unless you’re a member of PETA, which I think it’s safe to say, most of us are not.  And even if you’re a dedicated vegan and wouldn’t touch meat with a ten-foot pole, you’d hardly be surprised or especially disgusted by what’s in this video.  It’s not like one of those slaughterhouse videos that actually has a good chance of turning you off meat for quite a while, it’s just a McDonald’s factory where – again, big surprise! – they handle their meat safely and carefully.  It’s inspected multiple times and runs through a metal detector at the end of the line.  Gizmodo makes a big deal of that last part.  Guess what?  Virtually all food factories run their food through metal detectors, because all that food is run through machines that are – wait for it – made out of metal, and it only takes one slip-up to bring on a monster lawsuit.  These kinds of checks and balances are reassuring, not reason to be alarmed.

It’s rare to see a website as big as Gizmodo post something so naive.  Try again, guys – next thing you’ll be telling us they make bread from plants, and that cheese is actually mold!  Oh noes!