View Full Version : pink slime in ground beef in schools lunches
flowerseverywhere
3-12-12, 4:34pm
http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/8220-pink-slime-8221-petition-tops-170-000-175000153.html
" Beef Products Incorporated (BPI) spokesperson Rich Jochum said: "Including LFTB [lean finely textured beef, otherwise known as 'pink slime'] in the National School Lunch Program's beef products accomplishes three important goals on behalf of 32 million kids. It 1) improves the nutritional profile, 2) increases the safety of the products and 3) meets the budget parameters that allow the school lunch program to feed kids nationwide every day." They have also launched a website (http://pinkslimeisamyth.com/2012/03/10/lean-beef-trimmings-high-quality-and-safe-2/) and twitter campaign "Pink Slime is a Myth." What they fail to explain is that mixing "pink slime" into ground beef earns the industry about 3 cents for every pound of meat produced. Some advocates for using LFTB have praised BPI for their "tip to tail" approach, for example, not wasting any part of the cow. Siegel counters that any meat scraps were already being used in pet food and cooking oil."
this makes me nauseous
Next week, Thursday's lunch menu will introduce "Soylent Green"...
Ick,
Gross, isn't it? I first heard of this in one of the food-focused movies, perhaps Forks Over Knives?
It's been in the news in the past 2 weeks and The Lunch Tray blogger Bettina Siegel created a petition about a week ago to have this product removed from school foods. If you haven't already, consider signing: it's got over 200k signatures (in less than a week!) and has prompted defensive articles from the beef industry.
http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-usda-to-stop-using-pink-slime-in-school-food
I have seen articles about that too. Eeeeew. Thanks for the link Rosemary. I signed the petition.
One of several reasons why I rarely eat ground meats.
From a typical carnivore point of view, I'm not quite getting it. Pink slime is what they are calling scraps and connective tissue. So why is connective tissue worse than muscle tissue. Or fat or organ meats like liver? Or take hot dogs and sausage, which are basically meat scraps with some nice preservatives that are implicated in cancers and are high in fat and salt. Or the tradition of using intestine casings to make link sausages. I suppose there is a legal definition, but is a scrap just a small portion of meat from an unknown part of the animal?
This particular product is treated with ammonia to, apparently, make it "safe" for consumption. From what I've read, it is a questionable practice in many ways and I personally don't consider the result a food product.
I haven't eaten red meat in 20 years so I'm fairly certain I've never eaten the stuff, for which I am glad. Aside from the questionable safety of it I found an article by a guy who did a side by side comparison. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_FOOD_PINK_SLIME_TASTE_TEST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
He made 2 1/2 lb plain burgers. One with 85% lean beef with pink slime. One with 85% lean beef without. The pink slime burger was dry and gristly in comparison to the other. If I ate beef, even if I weren't concerned about potential health and safety issues, I don't think I'd like it just for the taste factor. We don't particularly skimp when it comes to food, and in this instance if I were inclined to buy ground meat I'd definitely attempt to find some that I knew didn't have pink slime in it, which I understand can be somewhat difficult since it's not listed on the label.
Someone did a comparison taste test, and the unadulterated slime-free ground beef won hands down in taste and consistency. That would be my concern, and I've noticed a decline in quality over the years from some suppliers.
Oops. See above.
Costco has never used the stuff, and generally sells high quality meat. There are lists of retailers who do and do not sell pink slimeburger, and Safeway and Albertson's--caught in the act--say they won't use it from now on.
Wow, "pink slime". Kinda makes you wonder who their marketing guys are. I'm not overly worried about it, we don't eat a lot of ground meat anyway. I did hear a report that 70% of the ground beef sold in the US contains this product so I'm sure we've wolfed down a little bit. Overall I think the biggest objection is from people who hear "pink slime" and think Soylent Green or the Cuyahoga River or Chernobyl without really knowing what the stuff is. Others hear that it is also used in dog food and automatically think they are being fed Alpo.
For anyone who doesn't know, this product is made from the meat that remains on fat that gets trimmed when a cow is butchered. It is not a hotdog-esque collection of hair, floor sweepings, dust, fecal matter, bugs, etc. and is not a cereal filler of some kind. Think of when you trim up a roast at home, if you look at the fat that gets trimmed off there are always bits of meat that you also cut away. What they do is simply heat those fat trimmings up to 100* to soften the fat then centrifuge it. The fat leaks away leaving the now lean meat. Since the pieces are so small it gets put through a grinder to get a usable product. So far there is nothing objectionable to me. I think the clincher for most people comes next. It gets treated with either ammonia gas, not doused in ammonia like some people are making it sound, or with citric acid (basically lemon juice). Either or both are done to inhibit bacteria growth. All commercially available meat goes through some similar process to help preserve it because the USDA requires it.
It makes total sense that it would be dry and not as tasty as regular ground beef. The fat in meat is what makes meat juicy. A ribeye is the steak of choice for connoisseurs because the meat in that cut is so wonderfully marbled with fat. And it ain't water running out of the best burger you ever ate! Any good cook can tell you fat is also a huge component of flavor. Why do you think bacon is so good or duck fat is treated like culinary gold? Once you remove all the fat you have removed what makes it juicy and flavorful which is why it would lose in a taste test every time, but you would still have pure meat. I know one thing for sure, I will eat this stuff WAY before I will ever touch ground turkey. If you want a stomach turner research what goes in that!
I'm trying to figure out what the downside of the ammonia gas treatment might be, if there is one. It doesn't sound appetizing, but is a naturally occurring gas. Ammonia in gas form is lighter than air so would dissipate quickly and I take citric acid (Vitamin C) as a supplement every morning so I don't think there's a big risk from either one, but I still want to know for sure. Beyond that I kind of think its a clever way to get as much use as possible from an animal, but suffers from a bad image because the popular media got ahold of an dumb inside joke of a nick-name. Not that media sensationalizes anything on purpose, of course.
Aren't the names always so important? Calling something "pink slime" automatically sways the audience in favor of those who oppose this practice, doesn't it? Just like the difference between calling it "sludge" versus "biosolids" can make or break whether people support reclaiming/repurposing our sewage. It's all in the name......that's why PR companies make the big bucks.
We don't eat much ground meat, so it doesn't affect us either way.....though the occasional bison burger really hits the spot....
I'm trying to figure out what the downside of the ammonia gas treatment might be, if there is one.
Well, when I want ground beef, I take a piece of a cow, and grind it myself. A cow raised within minutes of my home, by someone I know and trust. A cow I inspected myself before purchase, that was slaughtered and "processed" in an operation I myself can inspect and observe, by a fellow I know and trust. This way I know exactly what is in my ground beef, what fat content it has, and that it came from a single animal of known condition, and I have verified the handling of the food through its entire life cycle.
I think people are put off by the overly-processed nature of the "pink slime" product, and even if it were called "Soylent Beef" there would be issues. I also think it isn't honest at all to take a traditional foodstuff, such as "ground beef", produce it very differently from tradition (the "pink slime" process), and sell it as the same product. People aren't getting what they expect, what they think they are paying for, and you are asking them to put it in their mouths and swallow it.
As to ammonia itself, I avoid the stuff:
http://www.wagner-meinert.com/Portals/0/NH3_MSDS.pdf
flowerseverywhere
3-22-12, 1:52pm
an interesting thing about ground beef is that with regular beef or animal cuts contamination would be on the surface of it. I would think most contamination would be cooked off as you heat the meat. Once you grind it up you have all kinds of surface area and therefore much more of a chance of contamination being mixed into the meat.
I think people are put off by the overly-processed nature of the "pink slime" product, and even if it were called "Soylent Beef" there would be issues. I also think it isn't honest at all to take a traditional foodstuff, such as "ground beef", produce it very differently from tradition (the "pink slime" process), and sell it as the same product. People aren't getting what they expect, what they think they are paying for, and you are asking them to put it in their mouths and swallow it.
Agreed. Of course conceptual matters and reality are not always the same thing. Merely separating the fat from smaller particles of meat that can then be added to the already processed meat does not seem disingenuous to me. If that product were anything except just meat from the same animal, or batch of animals, that had just been butchered it would be a different matter, but it does not appear that is the case. If the USDA allowed ground beef to contain a little more than 30% fat (and be labeled accordingly) this process might be completed with a knife rather than a centrifuge. Personally I don't care if my pancake batter is mixed with a whisk or a Hobart as long as I know what's in it and how to cook it.
As to ammonia itself, I avoid the stuff:
http://www.wagner-meinert.com/Portals/0/NH3_MSDS.pdf
Ammonium hydroxide (http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9922918) [NH3(aq)] is what's used in food processing. Basically watered down ammonia (30% ammonia, 70% water, +/-). Turns out its also used in chocolates, cheeses, processing nuts, baking, gelatins, caramels & candy and pudding. Ammonia naturally occurs in all meat anyway, but they expose this product to the gas to raise the pH to a point where E. coli and other nasties can't survive.
Blackdog Lin
3-22-12, 8:28pm
Cheeses?!!! Tell me it ain't so! I do without a large part of today's processed foods, but I love my cheese, I don't know how to make it myself, and I want it to be ammonia-free.
I guess I need to research this.
Ammonia is one of the compounds that naturally develops as cheese ripens. Especially with softer cheeses, the riper they get the more ammonia (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_does_brie_smell_like_ammonia_when_it_is_too_ol d) is produced. As far as I know ammonia is present in all living organisms. What you should watch out for is too high a concentration of it. Fortunately it comes with its own built in warning system, that awful smell.
It makes total sense that it would be dry and not as tasty as regular ground beef. The fat in meat is what makes meat juicy.
In theory you're right. But apparently, according to the article I linked to, it doesn't work that way. He was comparing two batches of meat, one with pink slime, one without, both 85% lean. In theory they both should've been equally juicy. In reality it wasn't even close.
Personally if I had to guess, I'd say some big high paid consultant like McKinsey & Company sent in some young smart MBA who knows nothing about food to a packing plant, the guy (or girl) saw the tiny scraps of beef on the fat that was being tossed out and said "wait a minute. If we can figure out a way to cheaply get those scraps of meet off the fat we can mix it into the ground meat and no one will notice. We'll be able to utilize more of the cow and make a better profit!"
I don't think there's any doubt that utilizing more of the meat from animals to increase profit is the entire motivation for developing pink slime. People food sells for more bucks than dog food. Beef fat, with all the meat trimmings in tow, previously went to a different plant somewhere to be used in pet food. Now they have a way to reclaim a little more of the actual meat before shipping the fat off. It isn't inherently evil to do that and for me, being completely immersed in nose to tail eating, it (in a left handed sort of way) follows my personal philosophy. If anyone should be complaining about that part of the process its my dog.
I don't know how many of the taste tests were done. I found this link (http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Putting-pink-slime-to-taste-test-3424697.php#page-2) to one such test that wasn't really scientific at all, but seemed a reasonable way to test the product: cook a burger out of the stuff. I did find it a little misleading that the author chose to pit a "natural" product (not "organic", but still with no growth hormones, antibiotics, etc.) that cost $5.99/lb. against a generic burger with pink slime that cost $3.09/lb. The article also repeatedly referred to pink slime as filler, but since it is actually meat the USDA does not consider it filler. Basically meat + meat = meat. My best guess as to why one burger would be dryer and less flavorful has more to do with texture than content. My impression of this stuff is that it is something akin to meaty sawdust which would cause it to soak up the fat from the other meat it is mixed with. That would obviously make it dryer, but could it somehow render that fat/flavor less accessible to your taste buds? I'm not sure.
I am not really into becoming the defender of the slime, but I do think there are a lot of misconceptions floating around. That feeling is simply based on what I've read from sources outside the mainstream, sensationalist media. The report I heard on a morning show was about one step short of saying our kids will get cancer and die if they eat this stuff. I can totally agree that it doesn't sound all that appetizing, but from everything I've seen from credible, less sensational sources it also does not appear to be dangerous.
loosechickens
3-23-12, 11:46pm
I'm with bae......the only way I'm going to eat ANY ground beef is to grind it myself, from a piece of meat that I know exactly where it came from, which cow, who raised it, and how it was raised and butchered.
Even "ordinary" ground beef is often ground on an industrial scale by large producers, with meat from literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of cows mixed in together, and the "pink slime" stuff is all the scraps stuff hardly fit for pet food, let alone school children. They treat it with the ammonia stuff to help with the ecoli contamination, but the stuff is yucky in the extreme, and the fact that schoolkids would have it fed to them just disgusts me. Only one step lower than the chicken nuggets and other crappy food often found in school lunchrooms, but still.............
I don't think that most people really understand how much the production of meat in this country has changed in the past few decades. And how much is allowed in that production (how would YOU like to eat meat from animals that were fed ground up feathers and chicken manure? http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/core_food_safety/015272.html), and the concentration camp conditions of feedlots and slaughterhouses. Nor the chemicals fed to the animals to increase water weight of the meat to increase profits, the antibiotics fed to them, just the general difference between the idea of "cow out on the range, or in buttercups up to its belly" before being humanely slaughtered and making its way to your supermarket, and the reality of where your meat REALLY comes from.
Maybe it's time for another Sinclair Lewis and another Jungle......if anyone is listening. Well, they are actually out there, those exposes, but many people just don't pay attention.
We can rest assured that this "pink slime" is just one more way for corporations to squeeze more dollars of profit, with quality and health not even in the considerations........
yuck.
loosechickens
3-24-12, 12:33am
wow....check out the Wikipedia piece on this stuff......I don't eat ground beef anyway....had a hamburger in 2009 from organic beef raised by a friend, and ground right before hitting the grill, and no ground beef of any kind since, but I didn't realize that "regular" ground beef has already been having this stuff in it....the Wiki says that 70% of ground beef has had this stuff in it, and without labeling.....double yuck.....read the whole piece to see how this stuff is produced, what it's made of, and anyone who wants to think this stuff is wholesome food.....well, I have a bridge I'd like to sell ya........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boneless_lean_beef_trimmings
excerpt:
"Boneless lean beef trimmings refers to an industrial product created from beef trimmings using particular processes; these products are occasionally referred to using the neologism pink slime. These processes, which include meat trimmings passing through a centrifuge, and (in the most common process) being exposed to ammonia gas, have drawn attention as the subject of possible health and consumer concerns. The term pink slime was coined by Dr. Gerald Zirnstein[1] to refer to the resulting products.
A 2012 ABC News investigative report indicated that 70 percent of ground beef (beef mince) contains the lean beef, and that the USDA has allowed it to go unlabeled over the objection of a few of its own scientists.[1] A 2008 Washington Post article suggested that the boneless lean beef trimmings content of most beef patties containing the substance approaches 25%.[2]
These trimmings are sold in the US to food companies which use it in ground beef production. Most is produced and sold by Cargill Meat Solutions and Beef Products, Inc.[3][4] (BPI). The lean beef sold by BPI has become known for increasing the pH of the beef trimmings by adding ammonium hydroxide to destroy pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella, while the Cargill product uses antimicrobial treatments that lower the pH.[4][citation needed]"
loosechickens
3-24-12, 1:19am
Well, I guess we don't need to worry.....the producers of this stuff have a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal about how safe and healthful it really is, and today, Fox News is blasting ABC, as being "out to destroy a family business, and cost 3,000 jobs", with their activist agenda.....(you know, the "lamestream media".......)
In a dramatic turnaround, Fox News is trumpeting that the USDA thinks it is just fine (and we all know the tremendous faith that Fox News usually has in government agencies, hahahaha)....almost enough to make my head spin......
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/03/23/how-abc-news-smeared-stellar-company-with-pink-slime/#content
Well, let all those Fox News Fans eat this stuff.......not my problem. I certainly don't.
I especially love the way Fox News describes Beef Products, Inc. as a "family business" as though the wicked lamestream press is destroying someone's family farm.....of course, here is what Beef Products, inc., really is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_Products
"Beef Products Inc. was started in 1981.[3] It was a major supplier to McDonald's and Burger King,[5] as well as restaurants and grocery stores, and its products are used in 75% of the United States' hamburger patties.[3] The School Lunch Program, another large buyer of Beef Product's goods, used about 5.5 million pounds in 2009.[5][7] In 2007, the company was exempted from inspection by USDA.[8] A 2009 New York Times report, which stated that their products had tested positive for E. coli 3 times and salmonella 48 since 2005, prompted the USDA to revoke their exemption and review the company's practices.[9]
In July 2011, in the aftermath of an E. coli outbreak in Germany, Beef Products Inc. began voluntarily testing its products for 6 additional strains of E. coli contamination.[10]"
yep, just a "family business"...........ye gods........
how much of this stuff will the American consumer have to swallow before we just simply rise up and refuse to eat any of this kind of stuff and all the other processed, industrials "foods" these corporations try to sell us?
Although, after reading several pages of the comments by Fox News readers at the end of the article, many seemed to be quite happy with eating it, trust the suppliers, know Fox News would never mislead them, and don't want some liberals trying to tell them what they should eat......buen provecho, folks !
I don't think that most people really understand how much the production of meat in this country has changed in the past few decades.
The real shift occurred in the 1940's during and after WWII. My Dad wrote his thesis on the need for (what would become) organic production methods in 1952. Sure, it has progressed since then, but industrial agriculture as we know it was born in the 40's.
Although, after reading several pages of the comments by Fox News readers at the end of the article, many seemed to be quite happy with eating it, trust the suppliers, know Fox News would never mislead them, and don't want some liberals trying to tell them what they should eat......buen provecho, folks !
Really LC? It would be more interesting if you would tell us exactly what it is about the product you object to. Maybe something a little more defined than "yucky". Then we could all figure out together if there is something we should be worried about or not. Is it just more fun to think or Rick Santorum and a league of little trained minions eating their slime and eggs every morning? Or better yet, Newt Gingrich doling out portions to all the little Oliver Twists that line the parade route with their gruel bowls ready.
As I said, I don't want to be in the position of defending the product or producers, but I really do want to know more about it so I can come to an informed decision rather than a knee jerk reaction. Its fine and dandy that a lot of us here are in a position to buy great cuts of meat and grind them ourselves if they want a burger, but there are a whole lot of folks in this country that don't have as many options. This may or may not present one, but we will never know if the discussion degrades to the old tried and true model of slamming Fox news and anyone who watches it.
ETA: Ishbel, let me know if we reach a point where I should apologize to you and move this to PP.
There's been a lot of pushback - school lunch programs are supposed to get a choice of "slime-free" or not. And a number of major supermarket chains have said they will also be going "slime-free". But I expect consumers will be seeing price increases as a result.
I don't eat red meat so the issue doesn't affect me directly - the thing I found most disgusting about the whole issue is these "trimmings" are the parts that tend to have high exposure to fecal matter. So while it's "safe", I have to wonder how much of pink slime is not actually beef. I also wonder how much is being sold as an ingredient in other processed foods.
loosechickens
3-24-12, 1:43pm
Originally Posted by loosechickens
Although, after reading several pages of the comments by Fox News readers at the end of the article, many seemed to be quite happy with eating it, trust the suppliers, know Fox News would never mislead them, and don't want some liberals trying to tell them what they should eat......buen provecho, folks !
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Really LC? It would be more interesting if you would tell us exactly what it is about the product you object to. Maybe something a little more defined than "yucky". Then we could all figure out together if there is something we should be worried about or not. Is it just more fun to think or Rick Santorum and a league of little trained minions eating their slime and eggs every morning? Or better yet, Newt Gingrich doling out portions to all the little Oliver Twists that line the parade route with their gruel bowls ready.
As I said, I don't want to be in the position of defending the product or producers, but I really do want to know more about it so I can come to an informed decision rather than a knee jerk reaction. Its fine and dandy that a lot of us here are in a position to buy great cuts of meat and grind them ourselves if they want a burger, but there are a whole lot of folks in this country that don't have as many options. This may or may not present one, but we will never know if the discussion degrades to the old tried and true model of slamming Fox news and anyone who watches it. (Gregg)
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Hey, Gregg....I don't even have a dog in this hunt.....haven't had but one ingestion of ground beef in probably a dozen years, and that one was organic, ground right there from an animal with whom I was acquainted, (as bae prefers).
If I am "knocking" Fox News, perhaps it was the attempt in the article to act as though this whole thing was some liberal plot, by the "lamestream" media, to "destroy" a "family business" (which just happens to be a HUGE business supplying many millions of pounds of this meat filler product), as though the "liberals" were again just "attacking capitalism", and some poor family farmer. And what struck ME, even more than the Fox article, which really sounded as though it had been written by the PR guy for the huge business that Beef Products really IS, was the tone and comments of the readers of the Fox article. It certainly wasn't any sort of objective "reporting", by any kind of journalistic standards, in the piece, and I was sad that so many of their readers seem to have total trust in what they were saying, with no interest in any way in actually knowing facts, but seeing it simply as just another liberal plot, and the "lamestream" media pushing it.
Heck, the Wikipedia stuff I posted was pretty objective about pros and cons, what the stuff is, how it is produced, its history, the arguments for and against, etc. You could start there.
Hey, read them yourself, those comments by Fox Fans after the article. They are just as willing to accept any propaganda put out by the industry trying to push this stuff as any fervent leftie vegan might be to oppose it. They (many of them) have no interest in all in ascertaining the facts, no interest in anything other than bashing the "lamestream" media that is trying to tell them (to them) what to eat. And, I say, to folks who feel that way, "buen provecho", enjoy your meal....no skin off my nose.
And, yes, there IS an Oliver Twist element to this stuff, where large corporations are more than willing to pay lobbyists to ensure regulations that will allow them to put stuff like this into meat, without anyone knowing it, without labeling, so that the consumer actually THINKS they are buying a nice package of ground up sirloin meat, and has no idea they are PAYING for meat, and getting a certain percentage of stuff that wouldn't even be recognized as "food" until it's been industrially processed, chemically treated, and passed off, under cover as quality meat. And that the "meat" that poor people would buy would be likely to have the largest percentage of this stuff in it, quite unbeknownst to them.
I don't remember if it was in the Fox article or another that I read comments on, where a woman complained that her husband worked at BPI, (although he doesn't touch the meat, she says.....what does THAT tell you?), and that if this hurts his job, the fact that they have kids with "chronic health issues", will be hurt, and so people should quit knocking this product, or her husband might be out of a job. I found myself wondering if the KIDS eat the stuff.......
What do I object to? I obect to the fact that this stuff, until someone came up with this "brilliant" ability to increase profits, is so contaminated that it has to be treated with chemicals to be able to be ingested. I object to the fact that until maor complaints started coming in, the ammonia smell of this "meat" was so strong that it made people gag. Appetizing? I object to the huge amount of lobbying that went into getting this stuff approved, which really has no purpose other than to increase profits to the producers by allowing them to pass off as "ground beef" scraps and tissues that would have been considered too low on the chain to even go into animal feed. I object to the fact that profit trumps health, or honesty and that if you have enough money, you can get regulations written to your liking in this country, because our system of governing and regulation pretty much goes to the highest bidder, and getting worse all the time.
Does it affect me, personally? Nope. And if I were a poor person, I could eat a LOT better on basic foods, getting protein from beans, lentils, and whatever else, rather than subect myself to this industrialized "food" business, which really doesn't, any more than the tobacco companies, really CARE whether their products are harmful, or even just disgusting, as long as passing them off on the American people improves their profits and their bottom line.
I resent that the American people have not even had the right to KNOW this stuff was in their food. That so many TRUST these large companies to not pass stuff off on them that is not healthy. And, after all, what could be healthy about literally gathering up literally the garbage after meat slaughtering, and treating it with chemicals and putting it through an industrial process to make it "edible" (which is pretty much almost an oxymoron).
Hey, if you want to eat it, feel free. I'll say buen provecho to you, too. ;-)
ApatheticNoMore
3-24-12, 5:30pm
I think the clincher for most people comes next. It gets treated with either ammonia gas, not doused in ammonia like some people are making it sound, or with citric acid (basically lemon juice).
even that is naive. :\ Citric acid these days is usually made from corn. It may bear some chemical resemblence to the citric acid found naturally in well citrus (the argument for chemical identicalness is usually made for things like this, it's often not even so, and there is a long history of highly manufactured things that are supposed to be "just the same as" natural products not being so, not when they interact with the real human body). Basically I stopped eating citric acid, even the semi-natural sounding chemical compounds like citric acid aren't really what they seem. They *may* be harmless, but really who wants to play "food-like substances" roulette when you can just eat real food (or the closest you can get :))?
I actually do like ground beef, I thought if it was grass fed it was all good, but maybe have to look into grinding my own :(
Seems like every distributor in our area is coming out and saying "Not us! Our product doesn't use that." So, are they telling the truth?
ApatheticNoMore
3-25-12, 2:34am
Seems like every distributor in our area is coming out and saying "Not us! Our product doesn't use that." So, are they telling the truth?
I don't know about distributors but this page has a list of supermarkets that sell pink slime and those that don't (scroll down):
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/03/19/031912-news-pink-slime-grocers-1-4/
Also of interest from that page:
"Banned in Canada and Great Britain, the process of treating meat with ammonium hydroxide is also forbidden for all meat that is labeled organic in the U.S. That’s because the chemical is not on the approved list of substances in the National Organic Program."
With the information my family has found our own conclusion is:
1. This stuff actually is meat. Aside from the chemical treatment (see below) nothing is added to it that isn't meat.
2. The fat trimmings with the meat on them are no more contaminated than any of the rest of the meat that is processed in the same facility (or really any other packing plant).
3. Ammonium hydroxide is a commonly used chemical for treating foods to ward off bacterial contamination and no particular harmful effect on humans, at the levels used, has been documented.
4. As staphylococcus aureus and lots of other nasty little bugs become more and more resistant to the antibiotics fed to confined animals treatments such as ammonium hydroxide gas are going to become more and more common with all types of meats, not just the pink slimes of the world.
5. This is a clever method to extract the most meat from an animal that has been slaughtered for that purpose. It is, in a bizarre, industrial kind of way, the ultimate in whole beast eating.
6. All pros vs. cons logic aside our reaction was the same as LC's. Yuck.
Its not the worst thing on the shelf (by far), but thanks to several generations of my family being in the cattle business we might know a little more than average about how a slaughterhouse works and as a result we try to avoid the products that come from that environment. If my kids were truly experiencing hunger I would feed this to them in small quantities and not be terrified about the outcome. Fortunately my kids aren't going hungry and we have several other options for beef when we decide to consume it.
In our house we have decided to continue to seek out the high quality meat that we typically use. We're lucky that our family produces it so it is easy for us to get, but anyone can find a source these days. Our discussions around the table also revealed that all of us would rather simply do without any type of meat than accept the mass produced product on a regular basis. We all like beans, too.
loosechickens
3-26-12, 2:26pm
That seems like a workable middle ground, Gregg......if I had to pinpoint what has bothered me the most about this, it is that the stuff has been being slipped into meat produced in a normal way of grinding up a hunk of beef, a regular cut of meat, and that the consumers were believing themselves to be buying "ground beef" with the EXPECTATION that meant a regular cut of meat, ground up into hamburger, just as your butcher used to do, right in front of you......yet, up to 25% of that ground beef was actually this industrial product of reclaimed scrap that before would have been waste or at best pet food.
I think if they are going to put this stuff in, at least the consumer deserves to KNOW what is being purchased. Just as packages of various meats might say (as I've seen in stores), "water added", or just things as stuff injected under the skin of turkeys to make them "juicier". That way, you can at least CHOOSE whether or not you want to buy that product.
And if people are so price conscious, or have to buy the lower quality stuff because of money issues, at least they are informed.
What bothers me most is that the large businesses that produce this stuff were able to lobby to have it added to ground meat without any labeling. If it is, as they profess to believe, a healthy product, why not "sell" it as such, rather than attempt to hide it, give the impression that a regular cut of meat has simply been ground up, as opposed to what is actually the case?
It may NOT be harmful, although I'd probably argue that most all of these products are produced, not with any wish to IMPROVE a product, but to increase profit margins for the producers. Kind of a conflict of interest, especially when one group has the power to prevent another group from even knowing that they are ingesting the product.
good points......I know I kind of feel the same way.......I'd really rather do without meat than accept that mass produced stuff. But I wish that producers were forced, in the interest of honesty, to actually SAY what they are doing, rather than have it be a sleight of hand sort of thing. Sure they can argue that it is "just meat", (although apparently there is other stuff than 'just meat' involved, fat, sinew, cartilage, blood, etc.), but the fact still remains that it is "meat" that up until now, most accepted as waste or scrap, and was considered unfit for human consumption. Because they have found a way to treat it chemically so it isn't contaminated with germs to the point of genuine health dangers, doesn't mean that they had any intent to produce a better product, and the consumer deserves to know that, IMHO.
In the name of full disclosure LC, it is worth noting that the fat trimmings from which this meat is cut were actually never labeled as unfit for human consumption. It is perfectly good meat, its just that the scraps on the fat are too small to be worth going after by traditional methods (think of a guy with a knife). Obviously most human consumers aren't going to have much use for hunks of beef fat with just a little meat attached so the logical, step-down use was in pet food. The fat rendered away from the pink slime meat still goes for that use.
The other misconception that a lot of people have is that (pink slime free) ground beef is derived from taking large cuts of beef and simply grinding them up. There are a few cases where that is mostly true. Ground chuck, for example, is taken, or at least is supposed to be taken, from the front shoulder area of a cow. There's a lot of connective tissue in that meat so a lot of flavor, but its tough as a whole cut so not as valuable as other, more tender roasts. That's why it gets ground up fairly often. Regular ground beef, OTOH, can be meat from just about any part of the cow. It is all the scraps from the cutting table. It could be part tenderloin, part sirloin, shanks, plate, rib meat... All the pieces that get trimmed off the steaks and roasts you see neatly wrapped in the meat aisle get ground up and sold as ground beef. Nothing wrong with it, but we should be aware that it is the scraps, not just a new rendition of a hunk of meat you would buy in another form.
This was a news event that I actually tuned out of my mind and did not know anything about till sunday. I never even read the post here. I am a vegetarian and thought well this does not affect me, so don't get freaked out by reading it. I do not know yet if it was bad of me not to be interested or not. I guess it shows I can tune out what I want, but only for a time period.
loosechickens
3-26-12, 4:52pm
Good points, Gregg. Maybe I am still in the mode of when you picked a piece of meat and had the butcher grind it for you. Times really have changed, as now the meat is ground in large quantities far from the eyes of the recipient. Guess you can tell how long it has been since I have been a ground beef customer.
I'm a teacher and a vegan and while I see what comes out of the cafeteria at school, I rarely buy any of it.
I can say definitively if you'd like one word to describe what's coming out of those cafeteria lines (with rare exception in very few localities in the US) that word would be "brown." Everything that comes out of my cafeteria with the exception of the iceburg lettuce and hothouse tomato salad is brown or brown and fried. It's vile and so obviously unhealthy and fattening.
My advice to parents of kids who attend public schools: PACK YOUR KID'S LUNCH!
As far as I understand, this pink slime stuff has been in our meat for years and most people just didn't know about it. I'm so glad this is being exposed in such a major way across all the mainstream media. I have been following the story a bit but missed the very start of it. How did this get to be such big news? Was there one thing in particular that suddenly brought this to the public's attention? Kudos to whatever it was!
My daughter's school had this awesome fresh fruit and salad bar for the first time this year which was the best thing I've ever seen out of the school lunch program, but it's already been discontinued. I think it was funded by some sort of temporary grant. Hoping they will bring it back on a permanent basis!
Until then, I agree: Pack Your Kid's Lunch!!
I think it is bc some fast food restaurants stated that they're going to stop adulterating their meat with pink slime. And so it kind of took off from there.
Too bad about the salad bar. The there just isn't money for that in school budgets any longer and so many food industries (i.e., corn) are subsidized by the US government so they can dominate school cafeterias with their products.
I'm not far behind you LC. When it comes to school lunches we had several of my friend's German and Scandinavian grandmas as our cooks. The veggies were all canned in the winter because that's what they got, but we had fresh veggies in the fall and late spring because they brought them in from home. Bread and pastries (seriously, kolaches or cinnamon rolls!) were baked fresh every day. Meat was almost always something done with ground beef, but it was the real deal because our family and several other ranch families were under contract to supply it. We did have fried chicken once in a while, not sure where the meat came from. Lots of Catholic influence in our area so we often had fish on Friday and it was always walleye, breaded and fried at school, never fish sticks. Nobody ever really thought about grilling fish back then... It wasn't 100% healthy, but man it was good food. As bunnys said, that is no more.
I always wondered why US ground beef has such a strange texture; it makes weird clumps when one tries to brown it, and is slushy to the touch when one wants to make patties; it also explains the very unpleasant texture of fast-food burger patties. Now I know! I was already boycotting ground beef because I'd read that meat from up to 1000 cows at a time goes into the grinder, which seems to me to be a superbly efficient way to distribute, say, E. coli, from a single infected animal. This accounts for the millions of pounds that are recalled every year. I'll continue to eat less beef, select grassfed, buy it by the chunk, and slice or grind it myself.
Nothing about any of this surprises me; processed food of any kind is best avoided if you don't want any surprises. Having witnessed the slaughtering of a cow at age six, I still find it hard to eat one. I guess my farm mom thought it was ok to show her city daughter how it's done but the image of that cow being shot in the forehead and falling to the ground is still frozen in my memory fifty years later. Thinking about thousands of them being slaughtered in a day and then ground up together so we can eat burgers makes me feel worse than any talk of pink slime.
Citric acid these days is usually made from corn No doubt GMO corn?
ApatheticNoMore
3-27-12, 5:48pm
Nothing about any of this surprises me; processed food of any kind is best avoided if you don't want any surprises.
The definition of processed is such that you need to get more and more paranoid by the day though. I mean everyone knows McDonald's is processed but ground beef is processed now too I guess. Really though all the beef I got seems to be clean - bought either from Whole Foods (and I asked them several years ago and they told me they grind in store FWIW) or the farmers market, always grass fed, usually organic also. At most I consume around 1/3 a pound of beef a week, more often only every other week. I like it ground because I find steaks hard on my body (really hard to digest), ground I usually eat it on a salad with guacamole, salsa etc.. But maybe buy a grinder someday I guess ....
The definition of processed is such that you need to get more and more paranoid by the day though. I mean everyone knows McDonald's is processed but ground beef is processed now too I guess.
The safest assumption these days is that if you don't buy it from a source you actually know, as in can visit the farm and see your food in the field kind of "know", it is processed. As consumers we are obligated to ask questions if we care about such things. Caveat emptor and all that. I don't even trust Whole Foods enough to not ask, although they do seem more likely than other grocery chains to carry products with lower level processing.
The safest assumption these days is that if you don't buy it from a source you actually know, as in can visit the farm and see your food in the field kind of "know", it is processed. As consumers we are obligated to ask questions if we care about such things. Caveat emptor and all that. I don't even trust Whole Foods enough to not ask, although they do seem more likely than other grocery chains to carry products with lower level processing.
I would expect that Whole Foods would do their best to avoid carrying any products that are, or might become, viewed as questionable such as "pink slime". They've built their reputation on that and get people to spend more money then at a 'regular' grocery store precisely because of this. Headlines that their beef contained this stuff would be absolutely devastating to them. Perhaps the reason the make their own ground beef on site is precisely because they were not able to make certain that ground beef purchased from others would be free of this stuff.
I agree with loosechickens. My big beef (haha) with this whole thing is that ground meat with the stuff in it is not labeled as such. If it's really not any worse then regular beef from a health or taste standpoint then a PR campaign would've been a more appropriate thing instead of getting regulations that allow it to be put into ground beef without the consumer's knowledge. Then at least people could make an informed decision. They didn't do that. Either they did it this way because they figured it was easier or because they knew that they'd never be able to pull off the PR campaign once people started actually comparing the two final products and, like the Tampa newspaper article taste test, found that pink slimed beef just wasn't as tasty.
Our local news did a feature on "pink slime" this morning. They said that there has been a loss of 650 jobs in various processing plants since people don't want pink slime anymore. One of the folks interviewed, who apparently represented a neutral point of view, said that pink slime has commonly been added to ground beef for ten or twenty years, posed no health risk, and was a leaner source of protein that other meats used in ground beef.
I don't eat much meat these days, so maybe it's easier to criticize, but I grew up close to ethnic neighborhoods where more of the animal was used. I still have a little yearning for good home made head cheese, blood sausage, or liverwurst. Or some menudo with tripe. When pink slime first came out in the news it seemed like there might be some health and safety issues, but as things have progressed, it's looking more like only an issue of cultural perception over what part of the cow or pig should be consumed.
It's almost a little sad that this has had so much attention while things like HFCS and sugar, educating kids on healthy eating habits, the perils of factory farms, and other real issues are still struggling.
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