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# Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?

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## Video: Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?

[Watch (HLS stream): Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/LAZ5rnWZ.m3u8) (4:30)

![Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/LAZ5rnWZ/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2014-10-14. Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?_


---

Jul 27, 2023 5:22 PM UTC

---

## More From This Series

[All Videos](https://time.com/video/)

[Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?](/video/kPHpCcWt/)

### Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?

[Our food. Your questions. What are McDonald’s fries made of?](/video/nGOOAY0j/)

### Our food. Your questions. What are McDonald’s fries made of?

[Skeptic Of What’s In McDonald’s Food? Tweet Them](/video/RlG5OENh/)

### Skeptic Of What’s In McDonald’s Food? Tweet Them

---


## Transcript

Are there lips and eyeballs in there, Jimmy? At what point in the process do we inject the pink slime. Hey, can I have this to go? I'm Grant Imahara. McDonald's knows you have a lot of questions about their food. So they've asked me to help you find the answers. I'm in Fresno, California where I'm gonna show you. If McDonald's beef is real. Which way to the meat? All right, so we're here. Cargill's right behind me. I really don't know what to expect in there. Let's go find out. Hey, Rickette. Hi, Grant. Great to see you again. Welcome to Cargill. We're really excited to tell you all about McDonald's beef today.

All right. I'm eager to see some meat. Never thought I'd say that. This is the beef plant. Hey Kim. Jimmy. Grant. Hey. Hey Grant. How's it going Jimmy? Good good good. Welcome in [ UNKNOWN ]. Glad to have you here. I've got a lot of questions for you. Outstanding. Are there lips and eyeballs in there Jimmy? No it's 100 % beef trimmings from the cow. When we go to the tour you're going to be pretty impressed by the quality of beef that we have. Alright. Let's do it. Right this way to our beef inspection area. You know, when they say trimmings, I mean, these are, these are huge chunks. Some nice chunks, yes, absolutely.

This is some nice stuff right here man. Hey, can I have this to go. Ha ha I wish we can do that but unfortunately not. So you don't use any of that stuff, the what's it called lean. Lean finely textured beef or so called pink slime. We don't use that in our burger. Fingers. There is no giant machine that, [ NOISE ], and then puts it right in, in the, in the mix. Not at all. No. So then next step is to start the grinding, the product is loaded into our grinder here. And then they hand it over to a formulater, and they want to check this product to ensure that everything. We use quality all the way through, right?

[ CROSSTALK ] All right. So, that ground beef is automatically feed into our patty formers, and simply form our patties. So, you don't pour in any wood pulp? No wood pulp! Or, other kinds of meat? Beef in and beef out. Nothing else is added. Real simple process. And so where does it go after this? Wanna come around here? Well, now we get to look at a flat freezer. Wow. And so they start out just off the line, and when they get to the top, they're completely frozen. Exactly. And that is to insure that we lock in the flavors. This is the patties coming out of the spiral freezer. From there [ NOISE ] Simply put them in the box.

So how about we go taste some beef? Yeah? Alright! Let's do it. Alright. How's it going? Good, alright, so what do you do here? Well, what we're doing here is we're replicating pretty much exactly what they do in the McDonald's restaurants so we know what the consumer's gonna be getting in the end product. So your job is to eat hamburgers every day of the week? Yeah. Pretty exciting! You're living the dream! American Dream, awesome! And it's just going to go. yeah, pop right up as you can see right here. Alright. Take them off the way we put them on. Looks like a burger. [ LAUGH ] There you go, cheers.

Cheers. That's good. The only thing that we don't have here, though is we don't have lettuce and tomatoes because we have to test the product. Exactly the way that we do it here. But if you wanna try the real product, we can go to McDonald's. [ NOISE ] Moment of truth. Yes, sir. So you know what. I've been through the whole process. I know exactly what goes into this all beef patty. Yeah. There's no fillers, no preservatives, no additives, it's all beef and there's no pink slime. Nope, none at all. Oh God you know what it's been 15 years since I had a Big Mac. [ NOISE ] Wow. That's good. Yeah?

That's really good. Nice. McDonald's has a lot of other food out there and I know you've got questions. Kids. So ask your questions and I'll find out the answers.

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