A lot of people decided that LFTB was horrible stuff, based on no real evidence other than the fact that it's cheap. We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef. I'm not convinced that LFTB is sufficiently different to conventional minced beef to warrant specific labelling; we don't expect every ingredient to come with a precise description of how it was processed, despite the very substantial transformations that occur during e.g. flour processing.
Classism in food is absolutely endemic. A slightly facile but still important example is this paper from the BMJ in 2012. It analysed the nutritional content of 100 supermarket packaged meals and 100 recipes by popular British TV chefs. It found that the ready-made meals contained significantly fewer calories, less fat and more fibre than the recipes. We judge people for living on a diet of microwaveable meals, but switching to home-cooked meals might actually be a retrograde step in terms of nutrition if they follow the recipes of Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson.
Something feels intuitively wrong about that conclusion; that feeling is implicit classism.
>> We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef
Except you're flipping the burden of proof. Food product experiments aren't default-safe until proven otherwise.
Class is a red-herring. Wealthy people eat pesticide-free, grass-fed, organic, bpa-free, healthier, or low-preservative fresh food not to signal, but because they are risk-averse.
All food labels should contain exact information on what the product is in these respects, next to the ingredients and nutrition information.
> we don't expect every ingredient to come with a precise description of how it was processed, despite the very substantial transformations that occur during e.g. flour processing.
I expect this, but I've been disappointed at how we are doing so far as a society.
What feels wrong is that "fewer calories, less fat and more fibre" doesn't more nutritious to me - it sounds like cardboard. There's a lot more to nutrition than the (harmful) "fat = bad" meme. In the general case, home-cooked food, made from raw vegetables etc, definitely isn't less healthy than processed food.
Nor do I understand the classism argument - cooking food from raw is enormously cheaper. Maybe it's different in America, but in the UK £10 worth of ready meals will feed you for a few meals, while £10 worth of judiciously selected ingredients will feed you for a week.
It's projection. The real class conflict in play here is that the meat that is well-established as safe and healthy for consumption - as far as meat goes - is only affordable for the affluent. Everyone else has to eat meat that is processed so as to obscure its origins and make it more primarily amenable to storage, transportation, and, ultimately, sale. And not primarily, you know, health.
The FDA have deemed LFTB to be safe. Several other regulators apply restrictions on the use of ammonia in food processing, but deem FTB processed using citric acid to be safe. Do you have evidence that putting beef scraps in a centrifuge to separate meat from fat is dangerous? Do you have evidence to show that the resulting meat is in any way less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered meat?
We know that many species of fish contain potentially toxic levels of mercury. The FDA advises pregnant and nursing mothers to avoid those species of fish to minimise the risk of brain damage to their child. Why is there no stigma about eating swordfish or marlin? Why does a plump, juicy, expensive fillet of bigeye tuna seem intuitively more healthy than a Filet O' Fish, when only the former contains hazardous levels of heavy metals?
Because it's tastier and less processed, more natural. How well that correlates with being healthy is another matter, but I really have no idea where you're getting classism. No one thinks "Mmmm, what an expensive piece of meat. I bet the poors can't afford it - I'm buying it!"
I've lived in poverty. Following poverty, I thought your straw man's thought. I'm pretty sure I said it out loud.
While living in poverty, I knew that more expensive meat was better tasting, and better for me. The pink-slime level of meat products I could sometimes afford caused unpleasant GI symptoms which unprocessed meat didn't. I learned to avoid the cheap meat products and experienced intermittent anemia instead. Even the raw ingredients of pink slime, like tendons and cartilage, cost an order of magnitude more than pink slime products, so I went without.
Lack of access to a minimally adequate variety of affordable nutrition is a class problem.
I must have expressed myself poorly. I absolutely agree that access to adequate nutrition is a class problem. What I disagree with is the notion that our food preferences are shaped mostly by considerations of class. I.e. that we desire certain foods because they signal that we are rich, not because they're tasty and healthy and 'natural'. I'm sure that might be true for some people, but not for the vast majority.
Please consider that using the whole animal is a different thing to labeling the resulting product however they want.