 Besides hormones, what else is in a burger? Published in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, anatomic pathologists at the Cleveland Clinic recently dissected burgers to see what was inside. Fast-food hamburgers—what are we really eating? We eat 5 billion burgers a year, and most consumers presume that the hamburgers they eat is comprised primarily of meat. But what did they actually find? They analyzed burgers from eight different fast-food joints and found them to contain the same tissues observed in hot dogs. That's probably not a good sign. They found blood vessels, nerves, cartilage, and swarms of these little parasites in burgers from a quarter of the fast-food restaurants they sampled. No brains, though. That's good. But how much was actually meat? What percentage of a fast-food burger is actually muscle flesh, as opposed to these other tissues and parasites and fillers and everything? Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2% to 14.8%. 2% meat? They're practically vegetarian. And did that other 85% to 98% that wasn't meat? Ammonia. Thanks to some excellent investigative reporting, we learned last year that a company developed a novel technique for killing all the fecal bacteria, injecting beef with ammonia. The meat industry loved it so much it became a multi-billion-dollar industry and made its way into the majority of hamburgers sold nationwide. McDonald's, Burger King, and millions of pounds every year given to our kids at school. This is what the process looks like. It produces what one USDA microbiologist called pink slime, saying it doesn't even consider the stuff to be meat. And when the USDA says something isn't meat, not even good enough for prisoners in Georgia. They sent it back because the meatloaf stank like window cleaner. Why would they feed this to schoolchildren? School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef. 3 cents.