On this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know, Ben Bowlin, Noel Brown, and Matt Frederick talk about a bunch of food and beverage-related conspiracy theories – some very true and proven, others a little less so. Does Tim Hortons really spike their coffee with nicotine to make it more addictive? Does McDonald’s monopolize the pork supply when they start offering the McRib? Did KFC really genetically modify chickens so they would only grow wings, legs, and breasts? Is Outback Steakhouse somehow involved with the Illuminati? What about counterfeit seafood, “shrinkflation”, purposeful sterilization, and packaging? The guys leave no pizza stone unturned in their quest to debunk – or confirm – food-based conspiracies and urban legends.
Ben points out that it should be hard to get seafood unless you live on the coast, but thanks to the national supply chain, even people who live hundreds of miles inland can enjoy a nice calamari appetizer. Unfortunately, that calamari might not be calamari at all. Ben relates an anecdotal story about someone finding out that their calamari was actually pig intestines cut into ring shapes, but Matt scoffs it off as untrue, pointing out that frozen squid is relatively inexpensive and widely available, so why would restaurateurs bother replacing it? But counterfeit seafood goes deeper than calamari; an Oceana report found that 21% of seafood sold in the U.S. is being served under a fake identity, and Noel mentions that stingray or shark meat will sometimes be cut to look like scallops. And there’s some perfectly legal marketing happening on top of that: Patagonian toothfish, for example, is sold as “Chilean sea bass.”
Some people believe that some kind of chemicals are being put into food or drinks to purposefully sterilize or chemically castrate certain populations, like prison inmates. This one is harder to debunk because the U.S. has a very real, and very bad, history of enthusiasm for forced sterilization and eugenics. Others are very easy to confirm, like Aldi grocery stores discovering that many of their frozen, ready-to-eat beef products were actually made with horse meat, or how manufacturers have managed to give us less of their product for the same price with a practice called “shrinkflation.” And the realest conspiracy of all is the one right in front of our faces: The plastic packaging ending up in oceans and landfills worldwide. These guys have all these conspiracies scattered, smothered, and covered in this episode; dig right in to Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know.
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