Sysco, It’s What’s for Dinner, and Breakfast and Lunch
February 23rd, 2007Via: Slate:
A hot dog from Yankee Stadium. Potato latkes from the Four Seasons in Manhattan. Sirloin steak at Applebee’s. The jumbo cheeseburger at the University of Iowa Hospital. While it would seem these menu items have nothing in common, they’re all from Sysco, a Houston-based food wholesaler. This top food supplier serves nearly 400,000 American eating establishments, from fast-food joints like Wendy’s, to five-star eating establishments like Robert Redford’s Tree Room Restaurant, to mom-and-pop diners like the Chatterbox Drive-In, to ethnic restaurants like Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Even Gitmo dishes out food from Sysco. Should you worry that one source dominates so much of what you eat?
…
The Serve Smart Chicken is particularly frightening. While it looks natural, it consists of parts of other chicken breasts mashed together into a single, chicken-breastlike block. As the company notes on its Web site, our “unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost. … Available in four great flavors: teriyaki, BBQ, fajita and original.” What Smart Chicken tastes like, I’d rather not know.
Stuff like this is why our eating out is pretty much limited to absolute necessity or one of the Austin Whole Food’s bistros. You don’t need to read an article like this to know that most of what passes for “food” in restaurants these days is highly processed crap.
unfortunately, big business has caught onto organic foods and such. so people are opting out of the “regular” network of foods, and buying higher priced, better quality organics and whatnot. all the while the organic, free range, natural, et al foods are beimng coopted the monsantos of the world. and with the cooption comes the downgrading. better tasting than before, but now featuring more ways to harm the human physiology.
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Three words: Grow your own.
My German wife are slowly assuming stewardship of the vast house garden attached to the pile of Devonian rocks we now call home, by way of seeing to the “organic” nature of our foodstuffs.
When you cede quality control over the products crucial our very existence — and by extension your health — you sign a proverbial contract with the devil.
Yeah, you didn’t get your hands dirty and avoided all the bother of preparation, but are either of those really benefits?
And for the sake of mentioning it, the quality issue in regards to actual nutrition reaches much, much further than the cafeterias and restaurants of the world and their suppliers. Walk into any supermarket and try to find anything (and I mean ANYTHING) that ISN’T detrimental to your health outside of the produce section. Sadly, even there you’re out of largely luck these days, between the pesticides, irradiation and every other trick in the quiver of the industrial foods business.
Just finished reading the Slate article, directly after posting the comment above, and felt enough ire to be compelled to post a second time.
Comment #1: “But many quality restaurants, like Tree Room, use Sysco responsibly — shying away from pre-made items they can disguise as their own. Bardia Ferdowski of Bardia’s New Orleans Café in Washington, D.C., purchases only raw and unprocessed Sysco products such as flour, potatoes, and beef, and receives frequent deliveries so that ingredients are as fresh as possible.”
Responsible use? Raw hormone-laden beef. Unprocessed GMO potatoes. Fresh as “possible.” Give me a f–king break. Profit uber alles.
Comment #2: “Sysco founder John Baugh has been quoted as saying, ‘frozen foods taste better than anything I could grow in my garden.'”
That Slate would post a comment as absurd as this in the name of “balanced journalism” clearly demonstrates where the fulcrum of media interest is positioned. I’ll wager the lying arse has never tended a garden in his life.
Comment #3: “Many of Sysco’s products — the meat, the vegetables, the fruits — are not that different than what you’ll find at your local supermarket.”
Not THAT different? It IS or it ISN’T. High-performance Columbia-School-of-Journalism-quality weasel wording if ever there was. As I began reading I had the sense the writer was exposing something, muckraking even. By the end, I was wondering if he had any Sysco stock.
Sadly, most folks would consider this a well written expose of sorts. As a lifelong literary type who’s scraped together a living now and again selling words, I can assure you, Ida and Sinclair are spinning in their graves these days.
I’m crushed that Robert Redford – my serious lifelong crush – is a brainless turd capitalist when it comes to food.
Sob!
Farming for the future: Looks like a large scale Farmlet.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8059127780362004077&sourceid=zeitgeist