It's projection. The real class conflict in play here is that the meat that is well-established as safe and healthy for consumption - as far as meat goes - is only affordable for the affluent. Everyone else has to eat meat that is processed so as to obscure its origins and make it more primarily amenable to storage, transportation, and, ultimately, sale. And not primarily, you know, health.
The FDA have deemed LFTB to be safe. Several other regulators apply restrictions on the use of ammonia in food processing, but deem FTB processed using citric acid to be safe. Do you have evidence that putting beef scraps in a centrifuge to separate meat from fat is dangerous? Do you have evidence to show that the resulting meat is in any way less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered meat?
We know that many species of fish contain potentially toxic levels of mercury. The FDA advises pregnant and nursing mothers to avoid those species of fish to minimise the risk of brain damage to their child. Why is there no stigma about eating swordfish or marlin? Why does a plump, juicy, expensive fillet of bigeye tuna seem intuitively more healthy than a Filet O' Fish, when only the former contains hazardous levels of heavy metals?
Because it's tastier and less processed, more natural. How well that correlates with being healthy is another matter, but I really have no idea where you're getting classism. No one thinks "Mmmm, what an expensive piece of meat. I bet the poors can't afford it - I'm buying it!"
I've lived in poverty. Following poverty, I thought your straw man's thought. I'm pretty sure I said it out loud.
While living in poverty, I knew that more expensive meat was better tasting, and better for me. The pink-slime level of meat products I could sometimes afford caused unpleasant GI symptoms which unprocessed meat didn't. I learned to avoid the cheap meat products and experienced intermittent anemia instead. Even the raw ingredients of pink slime, like tendons and cartilage, cost an order of magnitude more than pink slime products, so I went without.
Lack of access to a minimally adequate variety of affordable nutrition is a class problem.
I must have expressed myself poorly. I absolutely agree that access to adequate nutrition is a class problem. What I disagree with is the notion that our food preferences are shaped mostly by considerations of class. I.e. that we desire certain foods because they signal that we are rich, not because they're tasty and healthy and 'natural'. I'm sure that might be true for some people, but not for the vast majority.
