Danielle Rennard, Staff Writer
Between balancing schoolwork, extracurricular activities, jobs and social time, sometimes finding time to eat is difficult. As a result, many college students find themselves turning to fast foods to get them through the day. Even in the small town of Oneonta, there are over ten well-known fast food restaurants, such as Dunkin’ Donuts, Taco Bell and Arby’s, that reel students in to get a quick and cheap meal. However, disturbing news has been released about Burger King fast food chains in Britain that may make you think twice the next time you plan to drive over there and buy what you think is a beef burger.
Fast food and a college lifestyle go together like burgers and fries. Sometimes it just might seem easier to get food whenever you want it than to wait for designated hours to eat certain meals. Besides the fact that the food served at fast food chains is one of the leading causes of obesity, the truth is that most people do not even know what they are actually eating. Burger King fast food chains in Britain, which have over 500 locations, have recently admitted to selling burgers containing horsemeat along with other meat off-cuts from Poland.
It has been discovered that the management of Silvercrest, a frozen beef, lamb and pork burgers and grillsteaks production company, has been using multiple different non-approved ingredients in their burgers for a number of household name brands. They had shipped tens of thousands of burgers from suppliers in Germany and Italy in order to meet demand in Britain’s outlets, and also shipped contaminated burgers to Tesco, Asda and the Co-op. Because Burger King created a cover-up for its links to the horsemeat scandal, they are facing allegations. They claim that they are sincerely sorry for the incident, and did it because they needed time to find an alternative supplier of beef.
According to Dailymail.co.uk, a spokesman from Silvercrest said: “Customers are our absolute priority. This is why we immediately withdrew these products until such a time that we could verify that there was no risk to our customers.” But if customers are Burger King’s “absolute priority”, why were they dishonest, for a good amount of time, about what was in those burgers?
This isn’t the first incident where fast food restaurants have been dishonest about the ingredients in the food they serve. In fact there have been several cases, and Taco Bell is another fast food chain that has had quite a history with confusion over what their food is actually made of.
“The meat mixture sold by Taco Bell restaurants contains binders and extenders and does not meet the minimum requirements set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be labeled as ‘beef,”’ said a legal complaint on the Huffington Post. So even though all the meat products at Taco Bell doesn’t meet the bare minimum requirements based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s standards, people still continue to eat there.
Is this healthy? Have we simply become careless about what we are actually eating? With the obesity rate in America skyrocketing, and health-related issues becoming prominent at earlier ages, it is time that people begin taking a better look at what they are eating, and leaving some fast food restaurant products out of their diets.
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