Most of us remember a school lunch item distastefully known as “mystery meat.” Of indiscernible color, texture, and taste, the congealed mass oft as not ended up in the garbage. (Looking at you, “beef” stroganoff. Why were you blue and gray? Why?)
A chef says that he recently happened upon some mystery meat in an unlikely place: his kitchen.
Like millions of others, influencer @the_journey76 fired up the grill over Labor Day weekend. He says he purchased Black Angus hamburger meat on sale for $10 per pound to make burgers.
Everything seemed fine until he started cooking. “The smell hit my nose. And I said, ‘This don’t smell right,'” @the_journey76 says. He pulled the meat apart but decided to keep cooking.
Once the burgers were done, he says it hit him. The texture, he notes, was more like Play-Doh than beef.
“See, ground beef—when it comes out of the extruder, it has strings you can see in the ground beef,” he says, referring to industrial machines used to grind meat at a mass scale. “This was more like putty, almost like Silly Putty.”
“Like that slime that you see that they make frozen burger patties with. Institutionalized food,” he says.
@the_journey76 then picks up a hamburger and squeezes it. “It crumbles,” he says.
This leads him to a bold conclusion. He says, “This ain’t beef. You can fool me all you want. This ain’t frickin’ beef. What’re we eating, folks? What the hell are we eating?”
Fake Or Fact
Rumors about fake meat being secretly slipped into the food supply have been circulating for years. Some believe it’s lab-grown meat. Others think it’s plant-based. Some think the purpose is altruistic—reducing the environmental impacts of the meat industry—while others argue that there’s a nefarious plot to feed us microchips or something harmful.
It’s not clear if @the_journey76 believes that the hamburger he purchased was actually fake meat. The text overlay reads, “Something is wrong with our food. My ground beef is off.”
He didn’t respond to BroBible’s direct message sent via TikTok.
No grocery store or restaurant in the U.S. is currently selling lab-grown meat, however. Plant-based meat has been around for years. Though sellers are required to clearly label what’s in the package with some exceptions. For example, a grocer is allowed to call a cut “mock tender roast” though it’s not actually a chuck roast or tenderloin. They are not allowed to falsely label something beef if it didn’t come from a cow, however.
‘Everything Is Different’
The response to @the_journey76’s TikTok indicates that he is far from alone in his criticism of the meat industry.
Top comments include “profits over people,” “America is an experiment,” and “everything is contaminated or plastic.”
People are widely convinced that the quality of food has decreased. As one wrote, “Chef for 25 years. Just in the last 5 years I’ve noticed everything is different and so many fake ingredients and chemicals.”
Many shared conspiracy theories about Bill Gates or referenced the 1973 flick “Soylent Green,” in which it turned out people were unwittingly being fed humans.
In response to a person who claimed the cult classic about cannibalism was a documentary (it wasn’t), @the_journey76 wrote, “That’s what I’m seeing.”
@the_journey76 Ground beef is off #creatorsearchinsights #tiktok #global #beef