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.
--
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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