The McRib is McNasty

I happened to come across this article on Yahoo by chance and I thought I should share it. Today, McDonald's is bringing back the McRib sandwich nationwide. This may not seem like an environmental issue, but if you have followed my blog, I posted a while ago about why eating a more vegetarian-type diet is better for the environment. You can read that here, but in short; less resources used to raise the food, less pollution, and it's healthier and more ethical. Meat is especially an environmental and ethical problem when it is produced in large-scale, factory farm settings. If that's news to you, you'll really be surprised to find out how disturbing the McRib is in particular.
The article lists 11 "amazing" facts about the McRib. I think "amazing" is being used here to mean "disgusting" and "people actually eat this?" Yes, I'm using that as an adjective. But anyway, lets go over some of the lovely facts...

• The McRib is made of "restructured meat product." That's a mixture of tripe, heart, and scalded stomach, which is then mixed with salt and water to extract proteins from the muscle. "The proteins bind all the pork trimmings together so that it can be re-molded into any specific shape — in this case, a fake slab of ribs." Not exactly the pork you had in mind. 
• What's in a McRib? Ok, well there's stomach, heart, tripe, and also pickles, bread, onions, and barbecue sauce. Think that's it? It actually contains over 70 ingredients, including azodicarbonamide, which is used to bleach the flour in the bread, and also in the production of foamed plastics. In the UK, it is recognized as a respiratory sensitizer. 
• Not really an environmental issue, but the sandwich has 500 calories, 26 grams of fat, 44 grams of carbs, and 980 milligrams of sodium. 
• An undercover investigation in 2010 revealed that Smithfield Foods, the supplier of pork to McDonald's, was inhumanly treating the pigs. They were crammed into crates, covered in blood, and baby pigs were tossed carelessly onto carts. I didn't watch the video because I don't want to see that, but there is a link to it on the article. 

To read the full article, visit http://finance.yahoo.com/news/11-amazing-facts-about-the-mcdonald-s-mcrib-170212930.html