You are what you eat! Puss and bovine growth hormone?

Dinner table conversations, or dinner TV or dinner Youtube require tact. Unless your parents are surgeons and you have been used to graphic descriptions of what can go wrong with humans, some subjects should be off limits at the dinner table.

One such topic is that of disgusting foods. In a multicultural family, the kind of food considered disgusting can be difficult to establish. Something as simple as the temperature of a glass of milk can spell disgusting in one culture and delicious in another. You can make most Americans shiver by praising a glass of warm milk.

Conversely, most Europeans will shudder when you talk about bovine growth hormone, given to cows to increase milk production. An aimless stroll on Youtube led us to a three part documentary about "Britan's Disgusting Foods".

To all the cynics among you who know pre-2000 Britain and would call "Britan's Disgusting Foods" a classic oxymoron, rest assured that food in the UK has become much better. A great little web site for modern British food is agirlcalledjack.com.

The series "Britan's Disgusting Foods" was made by the BBC some time ago and deals with the staples "meat", "dairy", and "fish" in a sometimes rollicking, always lawyer approved manner.

The K-Landnews Food Editor is a closet vegetarian*, which made the "meat" and "fish" episodes easy to watch. The sight of mechanically separated meat only caused a smile, and taking a soak in a fat filled bathtub on the sidewalk outside of the British HQ of German discount grocer LIDL, complete with lederhosen, was a feast for the eyes.
Note: By the time you read this, LIDL probably has done away with the bad trans fats mentioned in the series, treat it as a history lesson.

The "dairy" episode was hard to stomach, though. The controversy around bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is highlighted in this episode in an enjoyable manner. For this post, we decided to leave you with the web page of the American Cancer Society on rBGH.

The wording of the Summary section on that page is so cute, our Food Editor itches to do a post just on this marvel of wordsmithing. 

Although, this itching might have been caused by some of the small print ingredients in the candy bar after breakfast.

* The kind of people who spend more time removing pieces of meat from a dish than they spend eating.