Pruneburgers...

The Loony Bin ( loonies@bloodaxe.com )
Fri, 11 Feb 2000 23:11:16 +0000


The Loony Bin - http://loonies.net800.co.uk/

Hiya Loonies...

Here's news of the latest food trend...

Wishes & Dreams...

- ANDREA
        xx

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************ANDROMEDA******Internet Goddess************

  ------- Forwarded foolishness follows -------


Pruneburgers. 

The idea sounds funky, but school kids in several states are already 
devouring prune-laced burgers with relish - and with ketchup, too. And
if California's prune growers have their way, pruneburgers, which are
hamburgers with an added dollop of prune puree, could be spreading to a
school cafeteria near you. 

A pruneburger, say its fans, is moister, tastier and leaner than the
typical school hamburger. Prunes, or dried plums, have no fat or
cholesterol and are high in fiber and anti-oxidants, which combat cell
damage in humans. 

The market for pruneburgers has opened up as schools, worried about food 
safety and nutrition, have begun buying more and more low-fat, precooked 
frozen hamburger patties. The idea behind adding a small amount of prune 
puree to burgers is to make them less tough and dry than the average 
twice-cooked school burger. 

"In our taste test, the students really liked them," said Rich Peterson, 
executive director of the California Prune Board, an industry group. 

California growers sell nearly 200,000 tons of prunes here and abroad,
mostly as snacks. Prune puree is already being added to school hamburger
meat in a few other states, and is also sometimes used in cooking and
baking as a substitute for butter or margarine. 

To promote its concept, the prune board set loose its Washington
lobbyist, Dan Haley, who declared that regular school burgers tasted
"like hockey pucks". 

The board also sponsored a burger bash featuring the pruneburgers last
year for Denver schoolchildren and was apparently heartened by the
results. 

"This burger is juicy and moist - not like the others," "Tastes better 
than McDonald's," and "When are they going to start serving these?" were 
among the responses, according to the board. The growers group also said
that students rated the burgers above average for taste, texture and
juiciness. 

According to the prune board, the kids did not know they were eating 
pruneburgers. The amount of puree in each patty is so small that it does
not change the burger's taste, says the board. 

Interviewed at local hamburger joints, Bay Area teenagers were more
guarded - but generally optimistic - about the pruneburger idea. 

"If you can't taste the prunes, I think it would be fine," said Morris 
Goldin, 12, a seventh-grader at San Francisco's Herbert Hoover Middle
School, agreeing that the quality of school burgers needs improvement. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, Goldin said, school burgers are a zero. 

"They're dry. They hardly have any taste. You have to put on your own 
fixings. They just have ketchup and mustard. It's hardly decent." he
said, biting into a Carl's Jr. burger. 

Jefferson Andrade said he would rather stick to beef-only burgers. 

"I like prunes, but not in my hamburger," said the 16-year-old high
school junior. 

Quik-To-Fix, a Dallas company, already markets pruneburgers - known as
Quik `N' Juicy burgers - to schools in Colorado, New Hampshire and
Maryland. But the company avoids using the word 'pruneburger' in its
catalog, and it markets the burgers as containing 'dried plum puree' and
having a 'home-style appearance your students will go for'. 

Some meat processors already use cherry puree to make their precooked
burgers juicier. But Peterson, the prune board man, said prunes are
better. 

"The only downside with cherries is they are very red, and when you add 
cherries to the hamburger patties they come off still looking pink in
the center," said Peterson. "It's an appearance issue only, but some
schools are leery because the burgers don't look cooked all the way
through." 

The prune board is working hard to create a larger share of the market
for pruneburgers. 

In the nation's capital, lobbyist Haley is trying to persuade the
Department of Agriculture to buy prune puree and donate it to meat
processors who participate in the federal school lunch program. 

The puree would be purchased through a $400 million program that allows
the federal government to sustain crop prices by buying up surplus. The 
government then donates the surplus to food banks, charitable
organizations and sometimes schools. 

Haley said he recently was host of a pruneburger sampling for
Agriculture Department policymakers, but the federal agency has not yet
made a decision. 

"We're still looking into the possibility of buying the prunes," said
Billy Cox, a spokesman for the Agriculture Marketing Service of the
department. "We want to be helpful to the industry as much as possible."


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