Love them all natural ingredients.

I am not sure how much more information the public needs to change some of their food ingestion habits for health and safety sake. I quit the riding the burger train more than a year ago, and feel much better for leaving that station.

A well equipped kitchen includes a meat grinder, either manual or electric, for grinding whole pieces of beef from the same animal.

Burger processed at home from whole pieces contains no undesirable scraps such as used in commercially processed meat, is of higher quality, tastes better, stores longer and is less likely to become contaminated.

Grinding your own burger also allows you to control the amount of fat content. You can assure that it is 100% lean if desired.

Home processing also provides the additional security of controlling the cleanliness of the machines and food preparation surfaces.

I haven't purchased pre-ground, factory processed meat for decades for home consumption.

However, I must admit to occasionally and somewhat reluctantly consuming restaurant burger without dwelling on its dubious history.

At the end of the cow sales, the non-lot (disparate non-homogeneous groupings) of cattle come out. The eye tumors (from the cows grazing and jamming fox tails around their eyes which fester in eye lids becoming cancerous) and ones with deformities of various types, in short the ones the meat packing plants and/or feedlot operations scoop up, come out. Not a pretty sight!

We always tease newbies that they go to fast food places. Then ask them if they want to go to MacDonald's after the sale.

Its an old joke,  but it always works! 

Puts 'em off Micky Dee's for awhile.

Yep, if yer picky, grind yer own!

We once had a cow have a prolapsed uterus after calving and ex had me haul her up to Tulare to the killer.  Nothing wrong with her as far as disease or anything..but she was only good for beef at that point.  They had to drag her our of the trailer since she couldn't get up.  In days gone by, people would have butchered her themselves so as not to lose anything from the herd.

As much as folks love animals, ranching isnt for the faint hearted.  You have to make a lot of decisions that wouldn't sit well with city folk. 

I love it when people get all prissy about leaving beef for chicken.  While it may be better for you, the conditions in which they live and are slaughtered aren't much better.  If you truly want meat to suit ones sensitivities.... buy kosher.

I have a Muslim friend who has always ground her own beef and rarely eats in restaurants.  She cooks to their dietary standards.  The neat thing there was that her sons best friend was Jewish and he could eat at their house without worry.

We have started buying our beef and chicken from a local Halal store. Since it is more humane in the butchering process as well as what meat is acceptable for Halal. The price is the same or less than the grocery store and is fresher from what I can tell.

We have also increased our fish intake. Nice thing about living on the coast we can get fresh fish, seafood from the local street market.  Today we bought salmon at 3 dollar a pound.

IMHO chickens are treated (and processed) in even a more inhumane way than is beef!

I don't eat fish at all and can't eat chicken on the bone (I eat the boneless skinless breast only) so if I'm to eat meat other than that, it's either beef or pork for me.

Since I have no one to cook for, I'm not as apt to grind my own meat or prepare things in a special way.  Now that I'm not going to be working away from home much, I'll be doing more cooking here.  Working and being on the road a lot tends to make one look at a Whopper Jr, small fries, and a small coke for just over 3 bucks in a different way.  Dollar menus are a blessing for that lifestyle...a little rough on the arteries but quick, easy, and cheap.

I'm boring as all get out with work lunches.  Almost every day I had deli ham and swiss on toast.  I rarely ever varied from that lunch but on the way home, tired and frustrated, I knew I wouldn't cook anything and would end up eating popcorn for dinner and calling it a day.

we only eat bones less chicken breast, once or twice a year we will throw a chicken into a slow cooker w/ beans and potatoes.

That Chinese commercial is funny! About five years ago I went to China with a group of students from CSUB. A tour guide we had in Shanghai said that fast food is causing their kids to be American size. Some people in our group chose not to give him a tip because they didn't like him calling Americans or them fat. I gave him a tip, because there is no denying that fast food is crap and Americans are generally overweight. The Mc Donald ice cream cones were a lot smaller there. All the Chinese people were laughing at us, because a student in our group told a McDonald's worker that she wanted a large American sized ice cream cone not a small Chinese size. I'm not sure if everyone understood her, but she was motioning with her hands the height she wanted her ice cream cone to be and pointing to her stomach and saying she was hungry,

I actually weighed out 33 grams of sugar on a scale tonight, so I could see how much sugar is in a can of Lipton Ice Tea. It was an unbelievably huge pile. It was almost 1/4 of a cup.  I guess I'll go back to diet soda and take my chances from getting cancer from  artificial sweetners

"Hotandfoggy says: "....there is no denying that fast food is crap and Americans are generally overweight."

Here we go again.

The gross misconception that "fast" food is somehow any worse for you than slow food is absurd. It is a myth perpetrated by misinformed and highly flawed conspiracy theorists wanting to blame the nation's ill health and obesity on McDonald's, etal, despite the lack of a shred of evidence that their quick and convenient food is any less healthy than what one might prepare at home from ingredients purchased at the local supermarket.

The fast food industry merely serves the same basic fare as any other slow restaurant, prepared from ingredients supplied by the same stream of restaurant food and supply wholesalers and other providers that also service your local supermarket.

The fact is, McDonald's and the other chains serve meat, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, bread and other food items obtained from the same processors and distributors that supply all manner of restaurants and supermarket retailers nationwide.

There is not an iota of difference between their basic products and those sold daily to consumers in the supermarket for home preparation.  

But inexplicably, some have erroneously concluded that a McDonald's meal is somehow less healthy for you than the one you would cook at home using the same ingredients.

It just ain't so.

A cheeseburger, fries and a coke may not be the wisest or healthiest dietary choice, but in the final analysis, a burger is a burger, a potato, a potato period, whether it comes from McDonald's or the grocery store.

If it's the frying process that makes fast food unhealthy, then flame broiled burgers available at chains like Burger King or Carl's Jr. might be a healthier choice.

Yes, ground beef is processed in plants by arguably underpaid workers. And it's not a pretty thing. And it might not be good for you. But one has the choice to avoid its consumption altogether. To blame a handful of the plethora of restaurants serving ground meat for poisoning the country is bizarre.

The suggestion that purveyors and retailers of the product are somehow evil is similarly flawed.

Either way, there is no evidence that the ground beef, bread and veggies purchased from Von's or Albertson's is somehow magically any healthier than that served at the local drive thru.

Actually, McDonald's and the other "fast" food chains have strict purchasing standards and policy which contractually demand that suppliers provide the safest and best quality product. And McDonald's doesn't buy from just anyone. Suppliers must ensure that their products meet the chain's rigorous standards lest they lose their contracts.

Other fast food chains are equally as diligent, not wishing to have people sickened by their products.

You might even have less chance of encountering coliforms or other contaminants from a "fast" food purveyor than from the local market.

The bottom line is, a patty of meat, a leaf of lettuce, a slice of tomato or onion, a baked bun from McDonald's or any other restaurant for that matter, is likely as good or better quality as any available anywhere, whether it's cooked quickly on the restaurant grill or slowly at home.

The notion that "fast" food makes people fat is equally absurd.

Concerning obesity, it is primarily the result of overeating.

Chronic overeating to the point of obesity is a psycho medical behavioral disorder indicating self or even professional treatment.

The consumption of too much of any food, whether fast or slow, ground or not, leads to weight gain.

The degree of one's obesity is directly proportionate to one's caloric consumption, plain and simple.

It's a simple dietary equation: consuming too much, too often equals weight gain.

Common sense and self discipline dictate that one needn't have the biggie size or eat the high fat, high calorie, deep fried potatoes at all.

If people get fat, it's most likely a combination of the other high fat, high calorie, high carbohydrate foods consumed along with their Big Mac - you know, the cake, pie, ice cream, beer, candy, milk shakes, mega gulps of sugary soft drinks......

It doesn't require a PHD in nutritional science to accurately deduce that blaming one's ill health on "fast" food itself is just plain dumb.

Ronald, Wendy, Carl, Jack, the King, etal, are not responsible for the nation's consumption of meat, ground or otherwise or the collective obesity of the nation.

Did you read Fast Food Nation or see Supersize me? McDonald's doesnt' serve food, it serves artificial ingredients. I worked at McDonald's as a teenager, so I have nothing personal against them.

Hotandfoggy says: "Did you read Fast Food Nation or see Supersize me? McDonald's doesn't' serve food, it serves artificial ingredients. I worked at McDonald's as a teenager, so I have nothing personal against them."

Yes, I have both read the book and seen the films.

And yes, Schlosser offers interesting information, but falls way, way short of convicting the industry of anything more than contracting for the killing and processing of cows, pigs and chickens, serving virtually the same traditional foods as millions of moms and making a lot of money feeding millions of people at modest prices.

Supersize Me is a shamefully factless film blaming McDonald's for the nation's obesity that is in reality the expected result of individual overeating. The film doesn't merit the description of documentary. It merely shows that if you overeat you will gain weight just as you would if you consumed the same caloric amounts of mom's home cooking.

Yes, the wholesale slaughter of animals by processors is ugly and arguably inhumane.

Yes, if you pack away tens of thousands of calories in the form of cheeseburgers and french fries you will get fat and probably raise your cholesterol level regardless of where the food was prepared and served.

Yes, morbid obesity leads to other systemic problems.

But overeating is not the fault of restaurants preparing and serving the food any more than it is the fault of supermarkets selling the same products. Only you are responsible for your caloric intake.

Yes, the soft serve "ice cream" is artificially formulated, so what?  Don't like it? Don't choose it. But it hasn't killed anyone.

Yes, the soft drinks are also artificially flavored, is that the doing of the restaurant, too?

Even if the meat, potatoes, tomatoes lettuce, onions and bread served by "fast" food restaurants - which are obtained from the same wholesale suppliers that service the supermarket industry - were indeed artificial, it would be nothing short of scientifically miraculous.

Wow. It's hard to imagine how they make the tomatoes, lettuce and onions look and taste so real?

Are the cows and pigs not  real, either? Cool! Artificial burger and sausage has got to be better for you than the fatty real flesh from animals.

How do you suppose they make the burger buns, biscuits, muffins and apple pie look and taste so much like the real thing?

If all this stuff is made in a secret fast food factory somewhere, then McDonald's should be awarded the Nobel Prize for solving the world's food problems rather than reviled as the bane of the nation's health.

So, you worked at McDonald's like millions of other teens. Did you witness anything criminal or out of the ordinary you would like to offer?

Would you care to share some stories about what the teens did while working there?

I'm sure that would be interesting, if not shocking.