Humane Society Files Complaint Against McRib Pork Supplier

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Nov 4, 2011 8:55PM

The Humane Society of the United States has filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against agribusiness giant Smithfield Foods (PDF).

Smithfield is no stranger to complaints about how it gets its product from farm to table in the past (Rolling Stone's 2007 expose on the company still stands as a watermark), but the HSUS complaint details them in graphic terms:

Breeding sows were confined inside gestation crates so small the animals could barely move for virtually their entire lives. Frustrated by this extreme confinement, some sows had bitten their bars so incessantly that blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates.

And this one:

Three times, the investigator informed employees that a pig was thrown into a dumpster alive. The animal had been shot in the forehead with a captive bolt gun, which is designed to render an animal unconscious, and was thrown in the dumpster still alive and breathing.

The filing came a day after Smithfield launched a campaign to ensure investors and customers that their pork was raised and treated humanely. Smithfield is the pork supplier to McDonald's, home of the McRib.

Ah, the McRib. that annual treat from McDonald's with "real pork in a sassy sauce that makes you want to go 'CHOMP!'"

And it is, albeit from cuts more often referred to as "low on the hog." As Chicago magazine's Whet Moser explained last week, the McRib is put together with cuts of pork chefs like Paul Kahan and Paul Virant have ingrained us to eat alone these days.

(T)he McRib, or at least the restructured meat products like it, consists of staples—or even specialties—of other cuisines. Take pig heart, for instance. If you'd like to cook it yourself, here's a 1945 recipe from Gourmet: Coeur de Porc en Civet à la Pompadour, i.e. stewed pig's heart à la Pompadour, or bopis, a Filipino pig heart recipe. These sorts of things being unappetizing to the American palate, they're shredded and restructured into an obviously fake rib.

The funny thing about it is that everyone's in on the joke. It's clearly not a rib. Until I started reading up on it, I had no idea what was in a McRib. And I'm actually less grossed out by the concept now that I have a sense of what's in it. Tripe? Ok, that's cool. But ten years ago the idea of tripe would have made me queasy. I had to go all the way around and come back to accept the McRib.

But pork isn't the only thing in your McRib. You'll also find azodicarbonamide in the bun. That's a flour bleaching agent commonly found in gym and yoga mats, and the soles of your shoes.

Still lovin' it now?