Are Food Giants Poisoning You? Alarming Findings from Their Cookbook Recipes!
It’s hard to miss all the news these days about chain restaurants and supermarkets having breakouts of food poisoning. Since 2006, more than 524 people who eat the crap at Taco Bell have been infected with hepatitis, jaundice, salmonella, salmonellosis, and something called “Taco Dip Poisoning.” Tyson Chicken, Fresh Direct Salad, El Abuelito Cheese, Green Co. LTD, and Pilgrim's Pride Deli meats have given the gift of listeria for no extra charge. The CDC estimates that processed food translates into 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths annually.
But what’s the fuss? Corporations have been poisoning us for decades, and we willingly gobble down their foodstuffs regardless of risk. So, some friends and I decided to test-drive a couple of food giant’s Corporate Cookbook recipes. (Yes, they exist.)
Let's dig in.
ConAgra
With more than 20 proprietary brands ranging from Egg Beater™ to Reddi Wip™, ConAgra’s cookbook recipes read like a supermarket circular. We tested their Sloppy Joe™ Jalopy Sandwiches.
This creation calls for shoving ConAgra’s Hebrew National™ Beef Franks through some cucumber slices, fastening them with toothpicks and then wedging them into bratwurst rolls that have been toasted with two tablespoons of their Parkay™ Original Spread. Then dump some Manwich™ on it. ConAgra says you can add some vegetables, too, but only for decoration.
While trying to digest that, check out ConAgra’s Slim Jim™ Jerky products’ pickup lines. It’s hardly a surprise that an anthropomorphic beef stick would come up with an ad like this:
Others include, “I’m not staring at your boobs, I’m staring at your heart,” and, “Are you a beaver? ‘Cuz, Daaaaam!” Slim Jim is a master of bad taste.
ConAgra gets credit, though, for thoughtful “togetherness tips” on their “Parkay Spread™ Family Focus” section, including: Think about conversation starters throughout the day to help everyone open up at dinnertime. Try conversation starters like "What is one positive thing that happened today?" (probably not dinner) or "If you could be an animal, which one would you be?” (Probably an herbivore.)
Costco
The 11th Annual “Costco Way” cookbook delivers affordable food and a lot of it. With nearly 200 recipes, even the cookbook screams bulk. Unlike ConAgra, which makes you stick with their own brands, Costco carries scores of other people’s poisonous brands. And “celebrity chefs” that no one has ever heard of developed recipes for each for every conceivable combination.
We made this “Pizzaaa SPAM™ Bake” from page 175. It's simple enough: brown some low-sodium SPAM™ along with some Hormel® pepperoni and onion, mix it with cooked elbow macaroni and a jar of pizza sauce, top with some cheese, and you’re good to go. It serves 6 people if you can round them up.
Dow Chemical’s Brand Names Cook Book
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Ecumenical in a corporate way, this 1961 collection of delights promotes no single brand; rather, it pitches every known corporate food that can be covered up and set aside in Dow Saran Wrap™. Each of its rather desperate 700 recipes is brought to you by then-household names: Fruit and Shrimp Rings from Standard Foods, Unpeeled Bananas from the United Fruit Corporation and Corn Chowder from the American Dehydrated Onion and Garlic Association.
For the main course, we chose their Ham-Banana Rolls with Cheese Sauce. Just spread French’s® mustard onto slabs of boneless canned ham, roll each slab around a slice of banana, butter the outside, secure with a toothpick and bake to, uh, taste. Then cover all that with a mix of American Cheese melted in a cup of milk and two teaspoons of flour. For dessert, we made their Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake by adding Hershey® chocolate and Kraft® mayonnaise to a Jiffy® cake mix.
Results
After sampling from just three cookbooks, we started to see a correlation between what corporations want us to eat and what they want us to endure.
⭐️ Dow Chemical has by far the most repulsive recipes, which is no surprise, considering they’re also the people who brought us Napalm, Agent Orange and 96 toxic Superfund sites.
⭐️ ConAgra sets the rules—it’s their brands or no brands. So it’s no shock that since 1997, they’ve paid out $324.5 billion to people they poisoned.
⭐️⭐️ Costco, which voluntarily pays workers more than the minimum wage and offers the majority of their health insurance benefits, is the only one in the bunch that at least tried to offer thoughtful and balanced recipes. This is probably because they don’t want the healthcare premiums to go up.
Honorary shout-out to this go-to recipe book from McCormick’s:
As the saying goes, never eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.