What the heck am I eating anyway?

I am royally sucking it up in the diet department, people. I've been taking notes for the past couple days in a big executive type meeting. When you are an executive type, they tend to feed you all manner of delicious treats as an incentive for sitting through long-ish meetings. It just so happens that there is a corresponding opportunity for me to snitch some of the sumptuous treats. Like a cookie. Or two. And maybe some chocolate covered almonds. Perhaps a soda, or three. There might have been a bag of chips in there somewhere. I wasn't fully conscious after the two cookies, chocolate almonds, and sodas. Did I mention the cookies were that big soft delicious kind with hunks of chocolate that melt in your mouth? Well I'm mentioning it.

In other eating news, I was chowing on a bit of lunch meat out of the bag last night (sometimes I just can't be bothered by bread) when the description on the front on of the bag caught my eye. Given, this was not the kind of lunch meat where you can actually tell that it once belonged to an animal. This was more like the uniformly colored perfectly shaped thinly sliced material that may or may not be used to line airplane hangars. The thing that caught my attention was that there were no less than four verbs to describe how this substance had been coerced into posing as lunch meat. Something like "Chopped, Formed, Beaten, Humiliated, Pressed, Taunted, Cooked." I can't remember exactly.

Intrigued by the verbage, I flipped the package over to check out the ingredient list. The first two ingredients were "turkey," and "mechanically separated turkey." Now I ask you, what exactly is mechanically separated turkey? And how different must it be from actual verifiable turkey that they are required to list it as a separate ingredient? What are they separating the turkey from? Dog saliva? Discarded radiator caps? Violent chipmunks? And how exactly would a machine be able to separate turkey?

Can you imagine this? As my feverish little brain reconstructs it there is a vast conveyor belt littered with various turkey parts that the dog food company rejected. Hovering over the belt is a computer sensor with four different settings. The first setting reads "Shrug, Looks like turkey to me." The second reads "Okay, now you're stretching it, is that a toe?" The third reads "Damn, I didn't think that color existed in nature." The fourth reads "Oh Dear Heaven above, NO! For the love of humanity!"

Okay, so machines spout narratives in my head. What of it?

Wanna know the worst part? I kept eating it. I know I ought to be severely bothered, but I'm not really. I guess it's that good German-English ancestry. When you come from people who stuff innards into pies and crunch on gristle like starlight mints, a little verb overwhelmed mechanically separated meatish substance is nothing doin.

Grossed out yet? You're welcome.

Cyndi