"Pink slime" is made by centrifuging heated fatty offcuts, which doesn't turn my stomach that much.

I have a sneaking suspicion that what people find disgusting is the industrial production of meat, and that if Gordon Ramsey had a small and inoffensive centrifuge attachment for his KitchenAid the process would seem less gross.

Home production of meat is equally gross if not more. You probably haven't seen the meat market in Lagos (I’d think twice before searching that on Google Images). At least the industry has to comply with regulation and hygenical standards.

High status for the rich food can be gross, but it can't be low quality. Ammonia or citric acid processed slime-paste is as low quality as it gets. Adding pink slime to the product changes the texture. Pink slime less meaty and juicy compared to normal beef.

Good chef can do good simple food, but they want good ingredient and that's not that pink slime is.

On one hand, I know what you mean.

On the other, isn't it all really quite subjective? What you describe is tied every bit as much to irrational emotions about histories of things as it is about 'quality' in any measurable sense. What is considered the highest delicacy with a complex preparation in one century has that same process industrialized and becomes 'poor people junk food' in the next, despite being objectively, measurably a better quality product by every possible metric.

While your statement is true it's not exactly that straightforward since that is only part of the process and rationale for it. The US has just recently changed course on allowing pink slime to be labeled as "ground beef". Because of those recent changes by the FDA consumers have lost insight to what's in their meat unfortunately.

https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...

Eating only lean muscle meat is not a good idea anyway. Not sure the products you mentioned are healthy, but mixing things up a bit with skin, organs etc might be beneficial. Don’t hate the meat byproducts per se.

Most of the preprocessed meat maybe. I've never put chicken in my meatballs. And meatballs are easy enough to make that for the life of me I can't figure out why anybody would buy them premade. Make a large batch and freeze them yourself. They'll be a thousand times better than the trash you can buy at the store.

> I can't figure out why anybody would buy them premade

People who don't have a kitchen big enough for cooking in bulk like that? People without freezers? People without that amount of free time? People don't really like food? People with motion disabilities? I've probably missed out some groups.

>People who don't have a kitchen big enough for cooking in bulk like that?

By "bulk" I mean an oven tray or two. I'm not rocking an commercial kitchen here.

>People without freezers?

Where do they put their frozen meatballs from the store?

The time is amortized, if you don't like food then you shouldn't care anyway, and I really doubt most people buying frozen meatballs from the store have disabilities.

> Where do they put their frozen meatballs from the store?

Perhaps they're buying frozen ones to cook immediately (much like frozen meals)?

> I really doubt most people buying frozen meatballs from the store have disabilities

It might not be "most" for that one group, sure, but the groups I suggested probably do cover "most" in total.

This. Or even making your own marinara sauce. It’s payoff for the amount of time invested. NYtimes has a good recipe that takes about 20 minutes. The only trick is to find really good canned tomatoes.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara...

Even bad canned tomatoes are probably better than whatever fresh plastic balls you can find in your market.

Which is why one needs to be cooking for themselves as I have while eating my--coincidentally enough--made from scratch spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight.

Honestly though chicken skin is delicious. I don't know why it would bother me to have it in my meatballs.

Fried chicken is almost based on the idea that the skin (and enhancements thereof) is the best bit, after all...

But chicken skin is the best bit of chicken.

I seem to be the only one in my family who thinks so. I've always loved it, but my parents avoided it, and my wife and kids refuse to eat it.

And I'm the one who used to be a vegetarian for nearly 20 years.

(The best bit of the chicken is the thigh, though.)

did you farm the wheat or raise the cow? how do you know it's not GMO supersoy hybrid soaked in bee-killing Roundup?