AMERICA YOU LISTEN TO ME
IF YOU'RE NEAR A DATA CENTER, GO INTO THE FACILITY RIGHT NOW AND PUT YOUR HAND IN THE SERVERS FOR NO REASON
THEIR GPUs ARE YOUR GPUs AS OF RIGHT NOW
A chicken nugget can legally be 30% breading. That's a USDA limit.
By looking at the protein, you can figure it out. Tyson’s nuggets list white meat chicken, water, wheat flour, then a long tail of starches and seasonings under 2%. 5 nuggets weigh 90 g and have 11 g of protein.
Plain chicken breast has about 31 g of protein per 100 g. 90 g of breast would be about 28 g. The nuggets give you 11. The other 17 g got replaced by water pumped into the meat and breading wrapped around it, and the flour and starch on the label are there to hold that water in through the fryer and the freezer.
The quick check is the second ingredient. If it says chicken, water, the meat was pumped before it was breaded. If it says chicken, wheat flour, it wasn't.
Most decaf coffee is made with methylene chloride. It's the solvent that used to be in paint stripper.
The green beans are steamed, then washed in methylene chloride, which pulls out the caffeine and not much else. The beans are steamed again to drive off the solvent and then roasted at over 400F. FDA allows up to 10 parts per million. When a lab tested 24 decaf brands in 2020 it found the solvent in 10 of them at about 0.05 to 0.1 ppm, around 100 times below the limit. The industry calls this the European method.
There are 3 other ways to do it. Ethyl acetate, a solvent that can be made from sugarcane, which the trade calls the natural method. Carbon dioxide under pressure. And the Swiss Water process, which uses hot water and carbon filters and no solvent at all. Peet's says all of its decaf is water process. Starbucks has told reporters most of its decaf is the direct contact method, meaning solvent.
EPA banned most uses of methylene chloride in 2024, but food is FDA's job, so decaf wasn't part of it. A petition to pull it from food has sat at FDA since December 2023. FDA reopened comments on it in May and hasn't decided. If the bag says Swiss Water or water process, no solvent touched it. If the bag says nothing, you don't know.
I think one of the saddest things about modern childhood is the loss of cartoons as inheritance. I grew up watching Scooby-Doo reruns decades after it first aired. Kids today have more content than ever, but perhaps less shared cultural inheritance across generations.