MACROPLASTICS ATTACK!

Yesterday, while picking up some necessities (coffee beans) in a local supermarket, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up some overpriced ground beef and some other items to soup up the regular tomato-based sauce for the leftovers from the Italian sausage I’d cooked the night before.

Beef for sale, but only to a select few, in a (now-retro) future Big Apple depicted in the eerily-prescient 1973 film 'Soylent Green'. — Delicious beef, sporadically available as an increasingly infrequent luxury exclusively to a chosen wealthy few in a (now-retro) future Big Apple depicted in the eerily-prescient 1973 film Soylent Green.

Beef (excluding stuff like the patties inside burgers sold at McD’s or the few transparently-thinly-sliced ribbons of the stuff ladled along with some broth onto a mound of boiled rice in one of Yoshinoya’s beef bowls) is, for most in this city, a relatively rare luxury. Prices are high, selection is limited, and the best way to get value for your money is to buy whole cuts of beef (i.e. an entire ribeye or brisket) or large packages of ground beef from meat importers who deliver to your door. There’s a day or two minimum of wait between placing an order and the meat showing up, though, and our freezer was ground-beef-free on the day in question.

The six tiny packs of 'Australian' ground beef that I purchased last Friday, each containing a double-handful of meat. Two are out of view, beneath the top two visible packs. — The six tiny packs of ‘Australian’ ground beef that I purchased last Friday, each containing a double-handful of meat. Two are out of view, beneath the top two visible packs.

There were only 2 packs on the shelf but inquiring at the meat counter got me four more, not yet thawed. The photo above shows four packs (some still showing bits of ice clinging to the inside of the plastic wrap, and there were a couple more sitting under the top two when I snapped that picture. No weight is printed on the labels, which seems odd to me in retrospect, but each $49.90 (a little less than $6.50 in USD) clingfilm-wrapped tray held approximately two handfuls of ground beef.

The frozen meat thawed en route to our home and, once there, I headed to the kitchen, heated up a little bit of oil in a saucepan, chucked the beef in, and waited for the spitting sputtering popping sounds of simmering. When I’d popped the clear plastic wrap on each of the packages, I’d held the blood-absorbent pads against the inside of the tray with my thumb, while shaking the meat loose. The trays and the absorbent pad were all intact and nothing had seemed out of the ordinary.

I've zoomed in on one of the larger bits of white plastic here. Turning over and chopping up the beef with the edge of my spatula never failed to expose another little bit of white plastic. — I’ve zoomed in on one of the larger bits of white plastic here.
Turning over and chopping up the beef with the edge of my spatula never failed to expose another little bit of white plastic.

As is my habit, I ground some pepper over the mouth of the pot and, once the meat began to sizzle, started using a black plastic spatula to chop up the meat and turn it over. I didn’t get very far before I noticed a flake of something brilliantly white enmeshed with the beef. A bit of whitish fat or sinew is not an unusual sight, but they’re usually pinkish or off-white. This fleck of unknown stuff looked quite different — pure, bright, televangelist-chompers-level white.

When I plucked it out and looked it over carefully, there was no denying that the thing on the tip of my finger was an irregularly-shaped piece of thin, white plastic. After turning the heat off and moving the pan to a cool area of the range top, I ripped a piece of paper towel off its roll, laid the paper towel on the counter, transferred the bit of plastic onto it, and resumed hunting through the partially cooked meat with the spatula, looking for more and hoping I’d come up empty-handed. If, after a thorough search, I’d never found a second bit of macroplastic contamination, I might have gone back to cooking the meat. Alas, that is not what transpired.

Every splotch on this piece of paper towel is a bit of plastic.
If you see meat but no plastic, the exposed plastic is on the underside of the bit of beef in which it was partially buried or to which it was clinging when removed from the saucepan. — Every splotch on this piece of paper towel is a bit of plastic. If you see a little lump of meat but no plastic, the exposed plastic is on the underside of the bit of beef in which it was partially buried or to which it was clinging when removed from the saucepan.

Long story short: I found many, many more bits of white plastic. The photo above shows the haul I’d amassed through a couple of minutes’ worth of searching. At that point, I’d already resigned myself to ultimately disposing of the contents of the pan, but I persisted in looking, curious to see how much of the stuff I could eventually turn up. In the end, it seemed as though no matter how long I looked I’d always be able to find one more fleck.

The scenario which seems most likely is that, when the meat was ground or minced, some plastic (maybe part of the packaging in which the chunks of solid meat had been stored or shipped) clung to the meat, accompanied it into the maw of the apparatus, and was shredded and thoroughly mixed in with the meat. All markings (including dates) on the packs were identical, so I suspect they all came from the same batch. I spotted the first fleck before I’d mixed the meat up very much and I didn’t notice the issue being localized to one pack’s hunk of ground beef. All six were likely thoroughly macroplastic-contaminated.

It had been quite a while since I’d last purchased ground beef from a supermarket here and I may never risk it again. We will likely stick to buying from specialty meat importers for the duration.