On Mar 10, 12:48 pm, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Will There Be "Pink Slime" in Your Child's School Lunch?
> By KJ DELL'ANTONIA
>
> "Pink Slime:" it's tasty (well, probably not), nutritious (oops, not
> that either) and cheap (got that right) and it's probably found in a
> hamburger near you. Most particularly, in the hamburger or
> cheeseburger that almost certainly graced the lunch menu at your
> child's school this month.
>
> "Pink Slime" is the appetizing term for a ground-up amalgam of beef
> scraps, cow connective tissues, and other beef trimmings, once useful
> only for dog food and cooking oil, that are treated with ammonia to
> kill pathogens and then added to stretch the use of "traditional"
> ground beef (what most people once called simply "ground beef"). It's
> also known as "lean finely textured beef," and it's produced by a
> single, rather profitable, company in the United States: Beef Products
> Inc.
>
> As The Times described in 2009, faced with a glut of fat, connective
> tissue and other once largely unsaleable remnants, the company's
> founder developed a process that turned those slaughterhouse
> trimmings, which were more prone to contamination with E. coli and
> salmonella, into desirable (to hamburger-makers) filler by compressing
> them and exposing them to ammonia gas, killing the pathogens.
>
> The term "pink slime" came from one of two whistle-blowing former U.S.
> Department of Agriculture scientists who are on a crusade against the
> stuff, and particularly against its unlabeled inclusion in everything
> from school lunches to, according to ABC News, up to 70 percent of all
> supermarket ground beef. It's "not nutritionally equivalent," Carl S.
> Custer told The Daily. This is "economic fraud," Gerald Zirnstein told
> ABC News. "It's a cheap substitute."
>
> After the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver went on a tirade against the
> filler last year, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King decided to
> stop padding their meat offerings with it. Still, the U.S.D.A. plans
> to purchase 7 million pounds of it for use in school lunches over the
> coming year — and whether yours is a community where school lunches
> are prepared with loving care, or one where they're more of a standard
> production, if your children's school uses the meat that the complex
> federal and state bidding and supplying system procures, then the odds
> that they're serving "pink slime" are high. And they might never know
> it.
>
> Once Beef Products settled on a method of processing the beef
> trimmings that allowed them to be deemed fit for human consumption, it
> turned its focus to lobbying. First, it prevailed on the question of
> whether ammonia should be listed as an ingredient. Then, it turned its
> attention to the labeling of the filler itself. "U.S.D.A. officials
> with links to the beef industry labeled it meat," said ABC News. "The
> under secretary said, 'it's pink, therefore it's meat,' " said Mr.
> Custer.
>
> Maybe the use of the trimmings, ammonia and all, is just fine. After
> all, as Rob Lyons wrote for the Huffington Post, "Getting every last
> bit of meat off a carcass is a good thing, given the cost of rearing a
> cow. Butchers and meat processors are proud of the fact that they use
> everything but the moo." As for the ammonia, it doesn't sound
> appealing, but if you question whether or not your family sometimes
> consumes chemicals that it wouldn't necessarily have occurred to you
> to eat or drink, one read of Patrick Di Justo's "What's Inside: Tap
> Water" from the March issue of Wired magazine should remind you
> otherwise.
>
> But what's really bothersome about this is that we, as consumers, as
> school officials, and as parents, have no way of knowing if "pink
> slime" or "lean finely textured ground beef" is on the menu for one
> simple reason: paid corporate lobbyists convinced government officials
> that we don't need to know, and not, I suspect, because they had our
> best interests at heart. Someone, somewhere, thought that we wouldn't
> buy a product labeled "ground beef, with added connective tissues,
> fatty trimmings, and ammonia" — not for ourselves, and not for our
> schools.
>
> More:http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/will-there-be-pink-slim...
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
--
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