Trivia and TV

Trivia night was awesome! It was at a place in a nearby town called Mockingbird.  So much fun.  We are totally going again next week.  Mr. B won us free desert with his answer to the "shot" question.  We had tiramisu and a napoleon.  They were delicious.  I also got to eat a burger for the first time in a while because the restaurant we were at had a policy of using local and organic farmers.  Delicious!! :) (Although, after learning what I have, which you will learn too if you keep reading, I am beginning to question my decision on that burger.  But it was really really delicious and given their policies I feel safer eating burger there than I do somewhere else).

Now I am going to talk about this awesome show I learned about, purely on accident, tonight: Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.

I had never seen Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution before.  As a result of tonight's episode I will never, EVER eat ground beef bought from anywhere other than a butcher who I watch make it.  Here are the basics:

When beef manufacturers make meat, there is certain meat that is technically not fit for human consumption.  This meat is around the organs of the cow and can be contaminated with things like e. coli.  In order to make it fit for human consumption manufacturers "wash" the meat with ammonia.  YES, you read that right, they wash the meat with ammonia.  Then, the USDA allows these meat manufacturers to put up to 15%, FIFTEEN PERCENT, in the ground beef that they sell.  OMG. That is one of the most disgusting things I have ever learned about food.  To make it even worse, they do not have to tell you whether they participate in this practice, or what percentage of the meat is this "pink sludge".  SOO odds are every package of ground beef you buy is 15% ammonia washed meat.  Gross.

The other thing I learned from Jamie Oliver, who has a convert in me, was that the amount of sugar in flavored milk consumed by children in the Los Angeles area in a week is enough to fill a school bus and then some! No wonder obesity is such a huge problem in this country.

This is a picture of what I am describing.  Can you believe that part of the reason justifying giving children flavored milk is that when flavored milk is taken out of school, their milk consumption decreases.  Well no duh.  When you offer a child something sugary and sweet they are going to take it over something else.  It doesn't matter what the other option is.  Teach children to eat healthy, to want milk, and they will drink it.  This is not an issue with the child, it is an issue with the parents.  People are unaware of what is in their food; they are unaware of what they are feeding their children.  They are either not educating themselves, oblivious, apathetic, or potentially to busy to notice.  But people need to know what they are eating.  They need to know where their food comes from.  They need to know what they are giving to their children.  And more importantly they need to know what is being given to their children by people other than them.

Alrighty, I am climbing off my high horse now.  :)