The one time I don't read the label first...
Tonight, I spent an hour making fried rice. I washed and cut up a bunch of vegetables, fried them up, added my rice, cooked that for a while, and fried up some soy-sauce tofu at the same time. Then I added a seasoning package to the rice, because I'm lazy. As I kept an eye on the frying tofu, and let the rice keep warm on the burner, I checked out the ingredients on the rice seasoning, out of curiosity.
"Chicken fat." My heart sank. "Beef fat." Disbelief, and confusion. "Beef meat." Wait. What? Seriously?
I had a moment of "maybe I could eat this anyway, and pretend I didn't notice." I mean, it took me an hour to make it, and I was STARVING. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. In a package that held maybe three tablespoons of powdered seasoning, they needed to add two types of fat, and actual meat? And why, exactly, did they have to refer to it as "beef meat?" Could there be a legal need to be so specific? I imagined a roomful of executives, being told by the Research and Development Team that they would have to label it "'beef meat,' since it's not really normal beef, exactly."
I try really hard not to be that vegetarian who's all "Eating meat is gross!" (I mean, I smile when I see the stickers on stop signs that say "eating animals," but I don't put them there.) But, come on. Really? Are you going to defend this to me now? "Beef meat." Is that appetizing to anyone?
At least The Monk has a few lunches worth of fried rice in the fridge now. It's a good thing we keep breaded spinach patties in the freezer, for just such an emergency.
FYI: The tofu came out beautifully.
"Chicken fat." My heart sank. "Beef fat." Disbelief, and confusion. "Beef meat." Wait. What? Seriously?
I had a moment of "maybe I could eat this anyway, and pretend I didn't notice." I mean, it took me an hour to make it, and I was STARVING. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. In a package that held maybe three tablespoons of powdered seasoning, they needed to add two types of fat, and actual meat? And why, exactly, did they have to refer to it as "beef meat?" Could there be a legal need to be so specific? I imagined a roomful of executives, being told by the Research and Development Team that they would have to label it "'beef meat,' since it's not really normal beef, exactly."
I try really hard not to be that vegetarian who's all "Eating meat is gross!" (I mean, I smile when I see the stickers on stop signs that say "eating animals," but I don't put them there.) But, come on. Really? Are you going to defend this to me now? "Beef meat." Is that appetizing to anyone?
At least The Monk has a few lunches worth of fried rice in the fridge now. It's a good thing we keep breaded spinach patties in the freezer, for just such an emergency.
FYI: The tofu came out beautifully.