What’s really in that breakfast snag?
As part of our series examining the meat sector, Esther Taunton takes a look at the contents of the humble snag. Brace yourself . . .
Anyone who’s spent time in on-campus accommodation at a New Zealand university is likely to have at least one tale of ‘‘mystery meat’’. During my own university days, staff in the dining hall regularly dished up porous rectangular pieces of something more closely resembling bits of kitchen sponge than any protein I’d previously encountered.
Though it came served in a sea of tomato sauce, no amount of culinary cunning could have made that dish palatable and if news of our ‘‘bolognese’’ had reached Italy, New Zealand could have had a full-scale diplomatic crisis on its hands.
To this day, I don’t know what I ingested but perhaps that’s for the best. Because, as I recently discovered, poking around into the makeup of ‘‘mystery meat’’ is a stomach-churning exercise.
Believed to have been coined by US troops during World War II, the term ‘‘mystery meat’’ originally referred to canned meat like Spam, which was being intensively marketed at the time.
The phrase fell out of use until the 1960s when American high school students began using it to describe their cafeteria lunches.
Since then, ‘‘mystery meat’’ has been applied to many meat products, typically ground or highly processed, including burger patties, hot dogs, mince and chicken nuggets.
In New Zealand, sausages are perhaps the most readily available – and willingly consumed – ‘‘meat’’ product of dubious origins.
Under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, the requirements for food sold as sausages are pretty simple.
First, food sold as sausage must be sausage. Makes sense.
Secondly, sausage must contain at least 50 per cent fat-free meat flesh and this is where things start getting gross.
According to the code, ‘‘meat flesh means meat that consists of skeletal muscle and any attached animal rind, fat, connective tissue, nerves, blood, blood vessels, or skin, in the case of poultry’’.
That’s a lot of ‘‘meat flesh’’ that might actually be neither meat nor flesh, not to mention the other 50 per cent of the sausage yet to be accounted for.
Most basic sausages make up the difference with seasoning, fat and a bread base ‘‘filler’’. Other ingredients can include maize flour, corn syrup, dehydrated vegetables, preservatives and antioxidants.
It’s important to note, however, that not all sausages are equal and many varieties – particularly those produced by independent and boutique-y butchers – have a much higher meat content and a far shorter list of ingredients.
The sausage mix is then stuffed into a casing, either natural or synthetic, and precooked or sold fresh.
If, like me, you assumed most casings these days are synthetic, think again. With many sausage makers still using natural casings, there’s a high probability your sausage is sheathed in beef bowel.
Natural casings are usually made from portions of cattle, pig or sheep intestines, while synthetic varieties can be made from materials including collagen (from cattle hides) and cellulose.
But despite the disturbingly broad definition and scope for inventive ingredients, some sausages still don’t fit the bill.
Hutton’s Double Cheese Sizzlers, a favourite with kids nationwide, are marketed as a ‘‘nonburst and skinless processed meat product’’ rather than a sausage, given their 49 per cent meat content.
Why you wouldn’t just cram an extra 1 per cent of nerves and blood vessels in there and earn the sausage label is beyond me, but it is what it is and it’s not a sausage.
If the anatomy of a sausage hasn’t brought your breakfast back up, pink slime just might do it.
Also known as ‘‘lean finely textured beef,’’ pink slime is a low-cost filler made by melting the fat off scraps of meat and spinning it in a centrifuge.
The pink-hued remains are then treated with ammonia to kill germs before being added to minced beef.
Unsurprisingly, pink slime caused an uproar back in 2009 when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver released photos and video of the sludge, reportedly a main ingredient in McDonald’s products and believed to be used in more than half of all ground meat sold in the United States at the time.
However, a spokesman for McDonald’s in New Zealand said the ingredient has never been used here, where beef patties are made with 100 per cent locally farmed beef and chicken nuggets contain chicken breast, some skin, water and seasonings, as well as their batter.
In 2011, under pressure from consumers, McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell restaurants in the US stopped using pink slime.
Several major supermarkets later followed suit and, when eventually given the choice, dozens of school districts swiftly went slime-free.
Beef Products, the leading manufacturer of pink slime, shut down three of its four plants in 2012, citing falling demand.
That’s a lot of ‘‘meat flesh’’ that might actually be neither meat nor flesh.
Anybody who doubted the far-reaching effects of the supply chain disruptions on jobs and our economy only had to tag along to an employment subsidy announcement in South Auckland two weeks ago to be convinced otherwise.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was touring the Sleepwell bed factory in O¯ tara when her conversation with one of the company’s managers veered into a chat about a major piece of machinery that had been significantly delayed at the Ports of Auckland (Poal).
Not only is the ‘‘massive’’ machine stranded overseas, but the company’s core product is vulnerable to any disruption to trading routes between Asia and New Zealand.
There’s no bed, after all, without bed springs. And China is the closest producer which manufactures bed springs at scale.
Sleepwell is stockpiling bed springs to get through any future disruptions, but the extra warehousing comes at a cost.
‘‘I don’t think anyone thinks what’s happening at the port is an acceptable situation. It is having huge impacts,’’ Ardern told reporters at the press conference afterwards.
‘‘I spoke to a retailer recently. Knew their stock had arrived, but it was delayed and sitting on a wharf.
‘‘That is a huge amount of strain for that business. There are others who are reliant on what’s needing to be offloaded – including this business – ultimately, though, the port is not something we control.’’
Costs and delays are still mounting for businesses due to international shipping delays.
For starters, there’s an imbalance of containers at different ports, which is causing issues for our exporters.
Then there are disruptions caused by port strikes in Australia, extra shipping surcharges which are adding huge costs to already-negotiated contracts, a sudden ramping up of exports out of China, a half-completed automation project at the Ports of Auckland, maritime safety risks from exhausted crew stranded on ships, soaring container shipping rates and shipping lines cutting back their calls to New Zealand because they can’t afford to keep ships waiting at sea for too long.
On the face of it, a bed factory in O¯ tara which sources 99 per cent of its inputs domestically looks like an unlikely victim of these disruptions. The other 1 per cent, however, is crucial. Sleepwell’s stockpiling strategy is one being deployed by many other businesses. Employers and Manufacturers Association head of policy Alan McDonald says the conversation in business circles has moved on from the early talk of ‘‘onshoring’’ and bringing manufacturing back.
Most of EMA’s members appear to assess it as a global problem rather than the Poal-specific one. An informal survey of EMA members found 83 per cent had been affected by global supply chain disruptions.
‘‘A couple of manufacturing guys, they were actually considering shutting the plant.
‘‘Fortunately they got the componentry in time and were able to carry on. So, you know, that’s the sort of pressure that’s coming on.’’
McDonald says businesses are still exploring a range of options to diversify their suppliers, but some are banking on the idea that shipping will eventually return to normal once vaccines start to roll out across the globe.
Marc Levinson, a US-based economist, historian and author of The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, argues the opposite.
He says we may never return to the smooth, lean and predictable supply chains of old and argues that companies around the world need to come to terms with the cost of future disruptions.
‘‘My own view is that in globalisation the bean counters went wild. The bean counters said ‘we want this stuff made wherever the cost of production plus the cost of transport to the customer is cheapest.’
‘‘They didn’t really pay much attention to the risk that, well, maybe the components don’t get to the assembly plant or maybe the assembly plant has a fire.
‘‘These sort of contingencies, there was nothing that was pencilled in as a cost. And so, of course, if it’s not pencilled in as a cost then nobody thinks about it. This sort of globalisation, I think, was short-sighted.’’
And we might have to plan for future supply chain disruption because of the major investment shipping lines have made in larger ships. Levinson says supply chains function best when everything flows smoothly with a steady, but predictable, supply of goods.
However, over the years shipping lines have also made huge investments in larger ships.
This was great for the shipping companies who were able to deliver goods more efficiently and quicker, but it caused problems for other players in the supply chain like trucking firms and railway operators who suddenly had to adapt to larger volumes of goods arriving all at once.
‘‘As ships have gotten much larger than they used to be, many ports have seen fewer ship calls and a much more volatile flow of cargo.
‘‘And this is a huge headache. You’ve got this pattern of very intensive usage for a day or two [at the port] . . . rather than having a more even pattern of use over the course of the week.’’
Shipping lines also gradually started moving out of parts of the freight industry they weren’t making money on. Containers became the responsibility of others, as did the chassis these containers needed to be mounted on.
‘‘So we’ve had situations in which there were these containers arriving in port and then the truckers couldn’t find the chassis to take the containers away.
‘‘The ocean part of the system was operating more efficiently, but the entire system was not operating more efficiently.’’
The need for shipping lines to keep operating these larger vessels is one reason Levinson says he expects the supply chain volatility to continue even after the pandemic.
A trend towards these larger ships also has some implications for smaller markets like New Zealand.
Levinson says there are two theories of how this might play out for us. One is the end of longdistance shipping to smaller markets like our own.
In this scenario, big ships would stop at a larger port like Melbourne to transfer cargo to smaller ships headed for New Zealand.
Such ‘‘cargo-hubbing’’ already happens in the Pacific Islands with many larger ships offloading their cargo in New Zealand ports to be put on to smaller vessels for further travel.
The other theory is larger shipping lines will
Cars worth tens of thousands of dollars couldn’t be sold because they were missing chips worth less than $1.