Beaver bottoms? Silicon boobs? Just have McNuggets and a McFlurry

So apart from the obvious…

…stuff like hooves, scraps of nosebag, saddle and bridle, what other unsavoury things are in processed grub?

Well. There’s loads, apparently, and certain suspects keep coming up:

• Arsenic: in filtered drinks. All drinks, beer, juice, wine. Rice too, apparently. Poisonous and carcinogenic.

• Human hair: there’s this stuff in human hair that makes food last longer before going off. So, naturally, the barbershop floor sweepings are fair game for the fast food industry. How this gets past the anti-cannibal league, apart from the healthy-eating police, I don’t know. The names in the frame are M^cDonalds, Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts.

• Antifreeze: some soft drinks, it seems, have antifreeze in. Brings WC Field’s advice to mind. About not drinking water because of what fish get up to in it.

• Beaver anal glands: yep. Beaver…anal…glands. In ice-cream. Somewhere there’s someone pulling faces at Heston Blumenthal’s bacon and egg flavour ice cream, having a good faceful of traditional vanilla, without realising that it is beaver’s bum flavour, really.

• Fish bladder: in Guinness. The adverts don’t lie. Made of more. Made of more fish bits than you might expect for a beer.

• Coal tar: that’s tartrazine, the stuff that gets the blame when little oiks misbehave. Comes from coal.

• Breast implants: just when I was hitting bizarre-fatigue, good old M^cDonalds again. When ^McNuggets are only about 50% chicken, you have to make up the shortfall somehow. What could be more obvious filler than some gear with a zillion syllable name that’s used in false boobs and silly putty?

• Boiled beetle shells: that red food colouring? Yep, still beetles.

• Rodent hair: not an ingredient. But they get everywhere don’t they, and so does their fur. Worst in sticky stuff. Peanut butter. Chocolate.

• Borax: sounds ghastly. It’s fire-retardant (so you’d be less liable to spontaneously combust); and anti-fungal (so you’d be less likely to erupt in mushrooms); and in enamel (so you’d be shiny, and hard). Apparently it’s banned in food in America and Canada, but not in Europe where we know and love it as E285 (acidity control and preservative agent).

So. Salt’s bad, sugar’s bad, almost everything’s bad, and when the food police and the eating trolls are out to remove the joy from mealtimes how come they’re not jumping up and down on burger chains flogging human hair and breast implants before wetting themselves over a fried slice?