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Originally Posted by WereBear
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That's why I read the ingredients whenever possible, instead of just relying on generic terms such as "meat filling" or "seasoned meat".
Back in the 70's, it was very common to find ground beef in the stores that had another name (I wish I could remember exactly what it was called). In the small print, it said that it was ground beef combined with texturized vegetable protein - in other words, soy protein granules. It was a way of extending the meat, and making it cheaper for college kids, and others on a strict grocery budget. You could tell by the taste that it wasn't all beef, but it's what we did to get by in those days.
In the 80's, I remember finding dry TVP (Texturized Vegetable Protein) at a health food store. I'd soak the dry TVP in water, and mix that into ground beef to get more mileage out of a pound of ground beef. By that time, I'm pretty sure some artificial beef flavoring had been added to it, because it tasted a bit better than the mixture we bought in the 70's.
Of course that was during the time when I was blinded by the propaganda against red meat and fats, so I would enthusiastically add the TVP to ground beef, so we'd get some good-for-you soy protein in our diet, and cut down on that deadly red meat.
Back when Wendy's restaurants had a food bar, it was pretty obvious that their meat mixture (for tacos and tortillas) on the food bar was not 100% beef. It was also pretty obvious that their sour cream wasn't 100% sour cream either. (I think they called it sour cream
sauce, not just sour cream) Even the shredded cheese didn't seem quite like it was 100% cheese. I could tell these things were adulterated, because I grew up eating real foods (even if meals growing up were far too high in carbs overall for my body to deal with), so I could tell something was off about those foods.
But that was also back in the day when it was somewhere between difficult and impossible to obtain the list of ingredients for anything you ate at a restaurant. These days, there's not much excuse - you can usually find a list of ingredients and/or nutrition stats online, especially for fast food places.