Wednesday, September 10, 2008

This Quorn Quontains...


Ew.

This is totally not new to news, but something I've never heard before. I love me some vegetarian meat substitutes--I used to be really into Morningstar Products, and now mostly Boca. I've never tried Quorn, but I've heard quite a lot about its deliciousness over the years.

The widely held belief has been that Quorn was a mushroom based burger (mushrooms and soy being very common bases for meatless products), but it came out a couple years ago that the "mushroom base" was actually a shroom imposter.

The base of the product is a processed mold. Yeah. I said it. Sick, right?

Below, a savvy customer did some research after getting sick from the product:

"The mycoprotein that is in Quorn is called “Fusarium Venenatum”. It is a moldy fungus that is grown in large fermentation tanks by the Quorn corporation. Under certain conditions, “Fusarium venenatum” can morph into toxins known as trichothecene mycotoxins, causing nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Quorn products have sickened hundreds of people. CSPI has been gathering their sickening stories and sharing them on their website. They also are pushing for the removal of Quorn products from store shelves."


Um. Not only are those words I can't pronounce, but they are definitely words I don't want to eat. From their website, Quorn seems to be up and running...but I certainly won't be venturing into their meatless lands any time soon.

1 comment:

lifestudent said...

This is why you DONT EAT MEAT SUBSTITUTES. If you want to eat meat, then eat meat. If you dont want to eat meat, then dont. But if you dont want to eat meat, why eat fake meat? Just stay away from meat (real and fake) altogether.

I dont want to eat meat cuz its cruel to animals. But I will eat products that imitate the cruel treatment by pretending to be meat? Hmmmm. Fake meat eaters deserve to be eating all of the nasty stuff they put into it, just for being meat-eating-posers :)

Thats my rant.