Paul Jacobson

No pork in my chicken sausages please

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I don’t understand the appeal pork and bacon have. Granted I have never consciously eaten it (this Jewish boy just wasn’t raised that way) but why must it be part of 85.47% of meals served in restaurants and food on shelves?

This label struck me as a great example of something that drives me a bit nuts. I have, on occasion, gone shopping for sausages or similar meat for lunches and braais. I am frequently almost caught out by deceptive labels promising beef sausages but containing pork. As Andy Ihnatko put it recently: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!

Similarly, why would it be necessary for chicken sausages to have a notice stating they contain no pork? They’re chicken sausages! Beef sausages should be beef, not some beef and the rest pork. Beef sausages should be beef!

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Comments

  1. brady avatar
    brady

    I totally agree about the content for foods, but I think the label stating that a product contains no pork better servers those who consciously avoid pork than others who are pretty indifferent.

    Reply
  2. Kim Jacobs avatar
    Kim Jacobs

    I’ve eaten bacon, pork sausages, ham, peanuts, guava and pears and don’t like any of them. So I look at the ingredients to make sure my tropical punch has no pear or guava juice and my muesli has no peanuts.

    However, I think your point is the fact that the sausage manufacturers have been ‘bulking up’ their beef/chicken sausages with cheaper pork meat to increase the profit they make and now, these sausage brands are now using the fact that they *don’t* contain pork as a selling point to increase their own profits.

    So yes, I agree with you, I don’t want pork in my chicken sausages, and I don’t want added MSG in crisps, and I don’t want rbst in my milk..but I don’t want the manufacturers to think that it’s now a big selling point that they’re finally doing the right thing…

    Reply
  3. pauljacobson avatar
    pauljacobson

    Its more like saying “I don’t think I would enjoy bleeding out of butt” and never taken the opportunity to be intimate with an Ebola virus patient? Ok, maybe bacon isn’t that bad but does it have to be included with everything? Mugg & Bean should be renamed Mugg & Have-Some-Bacon-With-That.

    Oh, and Rich, if Matzah is your drawcard for Judaism, we should talk. We have a whole buffet of stuff that makes Matzah taste like cardboard.

    Reply
  4. pauljacobson avatar
    pauljacobson

    It drives me a little crazy. If the sausages are marked “beef” then they should just contain beef. Otherwise, call them “mystery meat” or “mostly beef”. I was almost caught out a couple times by Woolies stuff.

    Reply
  5. brady avatar
    brady

    Only now do I see your picture – it was taking a while to load while I made my first comment. Now I have to add this. Vienna sausages have traditionally included pork in the blend of meats used, without being called ‘pork viennas’, so I can easily see how something labelled ‘chicken vienna’ could simply mean a ‘vienna with chicken’, without having to mean ‘vienna with only chicken’, where I would still expect something labelled ‘chicken sausage’ to contain only chicken.

    Reply
  6. pauljacobson avatar
    pauljacobson

    I actually just noticed that the ingredients state that there is both turkey and chicken in the sausages. *sigh*

    Reply

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