Sunday, April 1, 2012

Is This The End Of Tupperware Parties?

While the agents provocateurs of the fifth column mainstream media have been busy feeding us red meat in the form of the sainted Trayvon Martin and the demonized George Zimmerman, the FDA, USDA and the EPA have been setting up an all-new round of scares which will prevent us from eating or storing any red meat they do not approve of. Science be damned, along with facts.

Things that we’ve long lived with and taken for granted, or weren’t even aware of are on the federal chopping block. The two items I have specifically in mind are Tupperware and [the newly-created epithet of] “pink slime.” The reason we took no notice of either was that nobody was harmed, nobody is being harmed, and nobody would ever be harmed by either product. But Nanny knows best, we must get hysterical, and the mainstream media must push the horror of it all.

First, Tupperware (along with dozens of other food container and disposal products you all have in your homes) has intentionally led us into storing our precious arugula and sprouts in containers loaded with bisphenol A (BPA). Omigod, BPA in all my storage items! This is on a par with saccharine and silicon breast implant carcinogens potentially causing the death of millions of innocents (do you even remember them?).

Never mind that the European Food Safety Authority (the ultimate hysterical nanny), the Japanese Food Safety Agency, the World Health Organization, and yes, the FDA have all found the levels of BPA in every current product to be completely safe. The FDA made that determination as recently as 2010. But using the insanely unrealistic high standards of the European Food Safety Agency, the pro-regulation bureaucrats have gone ten times worse and are now reviewing the leaching of BPA into our stored food.

The regulators have focused on the fact that they have “suddenly discovered” that leaching effect. From what they say, they were unaware that BPA was leaching into our food via pretty colored containers. And that must be stopped, immediately. However, the Europeans, the Japanese, and earlier FDA agents were all fully aware of the leaching. And they determined that the minuscule leaching of BPA is about as dangerous as a pinhead-sized drop of water leaching into your stored macaroni and cheese.

Interestingly, the papers coming out from the FDA and the National Resources Defense Council (a left wing, anti-oil chemicals group) have joined together to damn the danger of BPA. And it isn’t just Tupperware and their competitors. Almost all the food you buy in cans is protected from the metals of the cans themselves by internal liners containing BPA, and has been for over half a century without a single reported case of cancer resulting from it. You might be misled into thinking that the hysterics are just erring on the side of caution--that it’s a matter of how much BPA is leaching. Well, there’s a small problem with that. No matter what amount is leaching, it doesn’t much matter. The human body does not store or use BPA. It merely metabolizes it and excretes it.

Like saccharine and silicon implants before it, BPA is only dangerous if administered in daily doses 1,000 times greater than is possible to enter the human body in an entire lifetime. But the mainstream media have been stirring this pot for some time now. Ecoweenies and Nervous Nellies have been warning about the dangers of BPA in editorials and “your health” columns for years. With absolutely no scientific reason to do so, they advance their agenda by advising people to use glass and metal containers. Underneath lies the war against petroleum products. But here’s the clinker, 90% of plastic containers such as Tupperware are products of natural gas refining, not oil refining.

The NRDC has been handing horror stories to the mainstream media for years. And the mainstream has obligingly reported the stories as scientific truth. Most recently, the NRDC caused a panic for apple consumers and apple product manufacturers because apples were being treated with ripening agent called Alar. CBS’s 60 Minutes went so far as to start a story about Alar by showing an apple with a skull and crossbones superimposed on the image.

The “exposé” caused serious damage to the apple industry back in 1991 and 1992 from which it has not yet fully recovered. What the mainstream media didn’t do was to print or broadcast articles which scientifically proved that animal tests on Alar were analogous to drinking daily, for life, 19,000 quarts of juice made from Alar-treated apples. That result was similar to the much-earlier version of the dangers of saccharine. Now it’s the turn of BPA.

Up next—pink slime. What is this horrific chemical that they are killing us with? How dare the manufacturers poison us with deadly chemicals manufactured solely to make beef products look better? It’s called LFTB, and for years the USDA had negligently allowed its use, most often in ground beef. The only problem with the dangers of this dangerous chemical is that it is neither dangerous nor a chemical. LFTB simply stands for “lean finely textured beef.”

The only ingredient in this “beef additive” is, well, beef. Simply put, most home cooks trim their beef, but always end up throwing away perfectly good beef because it’s not worth the effort to cut around all the smaller fat globules. For the sake of efficiency and with the ability to do so, big beef product manufacturers use the pieces that the home cook would throw away. It quickly adds up to a lot of additional beef product. They simply use huge machines to pound, cut, mash, and refine the pieces into a product that can stretch the consumer’s beef dollar.

The end-product of this refining is a jelly-like beef substance that is easily added to already-ground beef. It’s very pink, and it could be described as slimy, though not after it has been added to the other beef product to stretch that product and give it a healthy reddish glow. Naturally, the bureaucrats and food-hysterics have decided that such a thing is unsafe for human consumption. In other words, more junk science. But if they called it a healthy beef additive, nobody would panic. So they named it “pink slime” in order to advance their bureaucratic agenda. What reasonable person would want to ingest pink slime?

So what does the scare actually mean, and what are the results? It means that a perfectly safe and 100% natural product has been demonized for no reason other than the personal whims of the food fascists. The result is that the beef industry will have to grow up to 1.5 million additional methane-producing cows each year to pick up the slack caused by throwing away a perfectly good product. The other result, of course, is higher beef prices. But Michelle Obama doesn’t care about that, does she? And besides, once the EPA discovers the additional deadly methane in the atmosphere, it can ban beef entirely (which is probably the real goal of about half of the vegetarian/vegan manufacturers of this phony scare in the first place).

So, my advice to all our readers is to beware of dangerous Tupperware and deadly beef additives. And most important of all, do not, I repeat DO NOT store unused ground beef containing pink slime in a Tupperware container. This could cause your painful death in as little as 1,000 years or so.

On a more serious note--today is Palm Sunday. This is the day on which Christians worldwide celebrate the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, fulfilling one of the Biblical prophecies. "And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, Hosanna to the son of David; blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest." Matthew 21:8,9

24 comments:

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

Is this an April Fools joke?

CrisD said...

Hey LawHawk! Greetings on Palm Sunday!
Didja ever notice about Libs that they don't care who they insult?Getting all high and mighty about beef filler "That the rest of us have to eat because we can't all afford a New York Strip Steak?" I mean, sheesh, Michelle is going for the arugala when I get the iceberg only when it's $1.19. Now, these slobs will up the price of storage containers for food by increasing regulations---
Some people cannot afford things. I always refute these type of people on facebook by telling them I simply cannot afford to agree with them.
PS As to applejuice, I rarely gave it to my toddlers as it is nothing but sugar water. Only dumb people let their kids drink it by the gallon (and they are a lot of times mom's with advanced degrees)

AndrewPrice said...

Tupperware is useful, which is probably why Obama wants to ban it.

JG said...

The BPA stuff I had read about before, but I hadn't looking into the recent pink slime "epidemic." Mostly because it seemed obvious that, whatever it was, I'd already had so much in my life without effect that it probably wouldn't make a difference now. Or like the "organic arsenic" scare a few months back. They're constantly on the lookout for the next DDT.

Individualist said...

This kind of nonsense is in the end damaging to a healthy market place. The reason the Soviet Union failed was because government bureaucrats made decisions like having show factoiries only make a "right" shoe for one year and make the "left" shoe the next.

This really is no different. By not allowing Lean teactured fine beef in a product it raises the price of hamburger which is one of the cheapest meats available. It will create a situtation where we all become starving peasants who have to plea for their bread from the Patricians who run the Senate.

This is what turned Rome into a dictatorship.

rlaWTX said...

another OT: I just heard a comment by an (R) former NY congressman that these endorsements come at a time when Romney's campaign is falling apart. What'd I miss? Or was he just an ABR trying to stay in the limelight and relevant??

Unknown said...

Joel: Not an April Fool's Day joke, though all these agencies are sick jokes themselves.

Unknown said...

Crus: And greetings to you as well.

Even liberals would have trouble drinking 19,000 quarts of apple juice a day. And then they'd be as full of pee as they are of the other excretion. I love apple juice, but I doubt that I drink more than four or five quarts a year.

Price is no object when it comes to saving us from ourselves, or so the liberals think. But these are the same fools who will pay $3 or $4 for a bottle for water. Water! It's all insanely elitist and totally unnecessary.

Unknown said...

Andrew: That would certainly fit in with every other nutso thing he's done. And why use Tupperware when you can store things in glass, which young kids drop and leave shards of lying all over your kitchen for someone to slice his foot open with?

Unknown said...

JG: And don't forget all those fish that are giving us mercury poisoning. The end is near! I'm just sick to death of these damned scares that turn out to be completely meaningless, but very expensive for the average person. Obama should spend a lot more time worrying about the poisonous items he lets slip by customs from China than about a product that has been safe for many, many decades.

JG said...

I actually did get into a (facebook) argument with a friend about whether or not drinking apple juice causes cancer. She finally conceded that you'd have to drink "tons" of apple juice for it to happen, but to be safe, you just shouldn't drink any ever. I don't care for apple juice, but really, what happened to happy mediums? "Moderation in all things," as my grandmother used to say?

Unknown said...

Indi: Much of it has to do with crony socialism and bureaucratic preferences. The EU finally admitted that its strict regulation of the size and shape of bananas was solely for the benefit of European investors in Africa and Asia where the plantations produce a much smaller banana than the ones imported from Central and South America (where Americans have big investments). They had claimed that it was a safety measure, but even the European sheeple finally figured out it was a scam.

Unknown said...

JG: Your friend is using exactly the same standard that the European Union uses and which the Obama administration would like to use. Eventually, we'll find out that everything we ingest will kill us. Then what?

The thing I remember even as a kid was that you don't drink a bottle of iodine or it will poison you. But if you have no iodine in your diet, you're likely to develop goiters and other thyroid problems--hence, iodized salt for safety's sake. Moderation, indeed. In parts of the world where iodine is not found naturally in the water or the foods, the results are horrendous--cretinism, mental retardation, infertility, and high infant mortality.

Unknown said...

rlaWTX: I just don't get the conclusions that these publicity-hounds create from their fevered brains. That conclusion is almost as silly as the left's conclusion that cooler temperatures over the past few years are caused by global warming. It's not only unscientific, it simply makes no logical sense.

tryanmax said...

LawHawk, you forgot to mention which agency it was that pushed for lining all the cans with plastic.

But in truth, there is one hazard associated with BPAs and pink slime. If they weren't there for paranoid libs to react to, I wouldn't have lost track of time reading this article, causing my sirloin to be overdone. I was shooting for medium, and I got medium-well. Oh well, it was still yummy!

The libs will be happy with me, though. Since it was a solid cut, no pink slime. And never leave leftover steak, so no Tupperware.

T-Rav said...

As long as they're not putting ground-up eyeballs or other elements of urban legend into the beef, I'm happy. And urban legend is all this "pink slime" is.

tryanmax said...

T-Rav, as a fan of natural sausage casings, giblet gravy, and menudo, it'll take more than a couple of urban legends to put me off. I watch Andrew Zimmern and think, "I would eat that."

Unknown said...

tryanmax: I think it goes back so far that there was no agency to regulate it. LOL I know you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was the FDA back in the 60s (the EPA hadn't been created yet).

Overcooked meat causes cancer, at least according to some of the hysterics. The rest want us to err on the side of caution by not eating meat at all. So--why are you committing suicide?

Unknown said...

T-Rav: When the feds promote an urban legend, it's called "consumer protection."

Unknown said...

tryanmax: They say that Germans won't eat anything that can't be ground up and stuffed into a casing. Coming from that background, I do just that, and use natural casings when I make sausage. My Kitchen Aid mixer even has the attachment to do the stuffing. But I haven't done it in years. You just gave me an idea.

tryanmax said...

LawHawk: while it isn't light reading, the FDA's Inventory of Effective Food Contact Substances can be found here. The intrepid reader will note that virtually all approved containment surfaces are some variety of plastic. In other words, what we have is another example of government faced with solving a problem of its own creation. But in this case, it's no problem at all.

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On a related note that I'm sure other Commentaramans can appreciate, when facts are scarce or difficult to come by, I can usually spot a hoax just by what and what number of problems a thing supposedly causes or contributes to. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia credits BPA with causing practically everything of current medical concern.

Tehachapi Tom said...

Hawk
Does this mean that my pink slime that I have stored frozen in those round Tupperware containers must be discarded.
I have it all in my freezer as emergency supplies in case the EPA outlaws broccoli.
Please tell me that is not true.

Unknown said...

tryanmax: Thanks. That is very informative. And as we know, Wikipedia is a very unreliable source if anything in the article can be skewed to the left.

Unknown said...

Tehachapi Tom: If that's your survival strategy, you're a dead man, at least as far as the green hysterics are concerned.

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