A tumblr blog called Early Onset Of Night posted a picture of that they claim is mechanically separated chicken. The substance looks like a extruded pink ice cream.
Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve—bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.
I’m by no means an expert on mechanically separated chicken but I think some critical thinking would be helpful. According to Wikipedia, mechanically separated meat machines are designed to separate the bone from the meat, not grind everything together into a paste. The picture and text has been reposted all over the internet as if it was true and many sites like Gizmodo are even claiming this is what Chicken Nuggets from McDonalds are made of (Lack of story verification is why I don’t read Gizmodo anymore and what does this have to do with gizmos). I’ve eaten Chicken McNuggets and they don’t look anything like this. I don’t believe that the FDA would allow a product on the market made of a whole chicken ground up into unrecognizable pulp with bacteria intact. I don’t know what this is a picture of but I’m pretty sure it’s not mechanically separated chicken.
Gizmodo commenter Jackdilla discribes MSC:
I sell over 100,000lbs of this monthly to companies all over the country. It’s not gonna kill you but let me clear up some confusion.
You would never find yourself eating a chicken nugget or a patty made from MSC. They are mostly made for lost cost feeding programs such as prisons.
The people below saying that its made from ground up chickens are incorrect. After the chicken is deboned and you have removed the breasts, drums, wings and so on you are left with the chicken carcass, which is just a bunch of bone with tiny pieces of meat attached. That is thrown into a special machine that grinds it up and separates the meat from the bone fragments. There are no eyes, skin, organs, claws, beaks or anything of that nature.
AND Mcdonalds uses all white breast meat in their chicken nuggets. So does every other fast food restaurant chain.
MSC is mostly used in hot dogs. Unless it says All beef or all pork then its made with chicken MSC. If it says meat then it can be a mixture of beef/pork/MSC.
It’s just a way for manufacturers to cut down on waste and provide a cheaper product for us.
A YouTube video shows a automatic poultry deboner in action.
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/_eAc5DC1KE0?fs=1&hl=en_US&border=1
Snopes has an article with this same picture and text. They provide additional information about MSC and how the information that is with the picture is incorrect. They don’t have any information about where the picture is from.
I probably should have named this entry “This Is Not A Picture Of Mechanically Separated Chicken” because it’s clearly a real picture of something, I just don’t think it was ever an animal product. It looks to me to be some sort of foam rubber product possibly used for insulation.
Note: Also NOT PINK SLIME!
Doesn't Fit In 