Do You Know How Lunch Meat Is Made? (It Looks Pretty Unappetizing)

When you're referring to unglamorous, unseemly work behind the scenes, you may describe it using the phrase "how the sausage gets made." There's a very good reason for that: Sausage, made from ground-up scraps, derives from a famously unappetizing process. Those who watch each step unfold might have second thoughts before ordering something off McDonald's sausage-based breakfast menu. Of course, it's resourceful to use every part of an animal, and it's perfectly safe if properly prepared. But, as is also the case with lunch meat, it's just much less appetizing to see how processed meat get made, than it is to eat it.

Tasty lunch meat varieties like ham, salami, and prosciutto comprise a $55 billion industry — but the process of making this popular lunch staple can be a lot more complicated than you might imagine. Some kinds of lunch meat are whole cuts that are taken from a particular part of the animal, like chicken breast or roast beef. But other meats, including bologna and salami, are processed from various chopped-up pieces of meat and formed into molds. On some level, you probably knew this intuitively — after all, there is no part of the pig called the "salami" — but it's another thing to see it in action. And, sometimes, even meat sold as chicken breast is actually an amalgamation of several different chicken breasts.

To make bologna, for instance, less-desirable cuts of beef or pork are processed and pulverized until there are no specks of recognizable animals to be found — just a pink slurry, or emulsification of fat, water, and protein. (This is one of the things bologna has in common with hot dogs.) From there, a combination of seasonings are integrated into the mix, commonly including salt, black pepper, nutmeg, and sometimes chemical additives to aid in preservation. Then, it gets pumped into casings, cooked, packaged, and sent out into the world.

On the flip side, consider chicken breast. Some cold cuts are made from whole muscle meat, meaning that what you see is what you get. But often, what gets sold as sliced, deli-case chicken breast is actually several chicken breasts, processed together into a loaf. Again, you've probably looked at the package of chicken breast in the glass case at the deli and wondered why it's so much bigger and rounder than any chicken you've ever seen. But it can be jarring to realize the truth of the matter. Still, since it is, in fact, chicken, you might have to zhuzh the lunch meat version up a bit — just like meat's biggest snooze: the boneless, skinless chicken breast.