Body Parts

The blog and Twitter account have been quiet for the last few days on account of Eastover celebrations and familial cheer. We're clearing our way through leftovers in the Mike L. Burger household and ready to return to burger mania in short order. For now, a piece on body parts.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about beef - this is not as rare as you would think - and he told me a curious tale. He told me of a steakhouse in Toronto without a standard burger on its menu, but that would gladly take any cut you wish from their selection of aged steak and grind it up to your specifications for the Monica Belucci of burger fantasies. It sounds delightful at first, but on second sober thought I feel that this is a choice of gleeful excess over rational appreciation of a cow's body parts.

While I say time and time again that burgers can be made from essentially anything - meat or vegetable or even fruit - many people do envisage beef when they think of burgers. It is therefore important to have a conversation about the parts of a cow, and what I feel is or is not suitable to use for burger meat. As I embarked upon this blogging adventure, my education of the noble beef-side was high on my to-do list. I'm not getting into breeding here, just cuts; for breeding I'll take a trip out to a rancher for a good conversation about the best beef breeds.

I won't go into gory detail, but if any discussion about animal body parts makes you squeamish, you should probably reconsider eating meat altogether.

More after the break.

At the dusk of a scandal: thoughts on pink slime

If you're into food and read the news, no doubt you have read about the so-called "pink slime" scandal in the United States. It reached a fevered pitch over the last two weeks as AFA Investment Inc. - one of the largest beef processors in the US - declared bankruptcy. A cadre of state governors gathered to express outrage at how this upstanding industry was under assault by a smear campaign, and that the product in question is perfectly safe.

As a blogger who writes about burgers, often beef ones, I feel obliged to weigh in on this tempestuous public debate and give my thoughts.

Read on after the break