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 Chatterbox Drive-In, to ethnic restaurants like Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Even Gitmo dishes out food from Sysco.
– Above is from Slate magazine, Every Bite You Take: How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat by Ulrich Boser ( Feb. 21, 2007 )
Sysco food products are everywhere. For example their SmartServe chicken:
Our fully cooked Classic Brand SmartServe glazed chicken breast fillets have the appearance, taste and texture of a whole chicken breast at a much lower cost, plus they offer better portion control, consistent quality and easy preparation.
Unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost.
I found this material ( and more ) from a Metafilter posting. While it’s interestingly gross, what it reminds me of is the text media — what I get from news and magazine sources either in print or on the internet. It’s all so fully processed. It tastes like chicken, but it’s really some pulverized reshaped, colored, flavored, preserved mystery meat.
Blogs, on the other hand, are real chicken. Even if it’s sometimes not fresh, cooked from scratch, they’re giving me the real chicken bits ( chosen extracts/quotes ) , sorted out of the processed mish-mash of the commercial media.
Yummy. Thank you to everybody who takes the time to post regularly. You keep me well fed.
-Julie
