Our very own SecretBurgers?

"The secret of SecretBurgers was that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them: the counter girls wore T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan Secret Burgers! Because Everyone Loves a Secret! ... The meat grinders weren't 100 per cent efficient; you might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail. Was there a human fingernail, once?" (Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, p. 33)

I particularly was thinking about Atwood's horrific imagined burgers when I read a NY Times article about hamburgers -- which many food writers have since been talking about. Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Inspection of Ground Beef points out that actual non-secret burgers, from Cargill, which sickened people recently, were "a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria." Another article pointed out that meat from as many as 400 cows (some maybe sick) could be in a single hamburger.

The Year of the Flood includes many seemingly idealistic characters. The most sympathetic ones try to maintain an organic food and generally green lifestyle in the face of a deteriorating, and eventually catastrophic, environment. Many of them take a vegetarian vow, thanks to the food supplies that they have available. But wait: this is a distopian future, not a book about reality.

Maybe. Ursula LeGuin in a review of the book points out that Atwood refuses to classify her works as science fiction. Instead, Atwood claims: "everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can't be science fiction." Well, maybe it's so. Especially about SecretBurgers?