An even worse food than Aussie Fries…
Seems Men’s Health spoke too soon in impugning Outback Steakhouse’s Aussie Fries (see earlier post here).
Armour brand pork brains in milk gravy contain more than 1000% of your daily recommended intake of cholesterol. On the other hand, it is brain food.
(Hat tip consumerist.)
(more under the fold)
As is so often the case, the backstory is more interesting than the immediate details. It turns out Armour and Company was Chicago’s biggest slaughterhouse in the 19th century, the kind of upstanding workplace Upton Sinclair would make famous in The Jungle. They contributed to the US effort in the Spanish Civil War by sending 750 cases of canned, rotted meat.
As a ruthlessly efficient business — an economic piranha, as it were — Armour didn’t just make meat products, it transformed the rest of the animals into product as well: as per Wikipedia, they made glue, hairbrushes, even buttons!
A side-business gained prominence when they added a germicidal agent to soap, creating “Dial”. (Yes, Dial was dreamed up by a slaughterhouse.)
Dial has put out literature arguing that use of their product has not accelerated the evolution of germicide-resistant microbes, though that’s somewhat counterintuitive. More generally, germicide overuse has been identified by academia as a possible contributor to reduced antibiotic effectiveness. Of course, it could be that Dial’s germicidal agent is so overpowering, and present in such overwhelming amounts, that it annihilates all critters it encounters.
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Continuing the Armour saga, it has been variously shuffled off (like so many medieval daughters of royalty into marriages-of-convenience) to bus company Greyhound, some German firm named Henkel, Pinnacle Foods, which was itself swallowed up by private equity firm the Blackstone Group.