At least one industry pundit is saying the fallout over Lean Finely-Textured Beef (LFTB) – popularly known now as “Pink Slime” – is a product more of hysteria than science.
And she’s right.
While much greater food safety issues proliferate, retailers like Wal-Mart, Kroger and Supevalu, as well as burger chains McDonald’s and Burger King have panicked and dropped so-called pink slime because it seems, well, nasty. Change.org has reportedly signed up 250,000 signatures trying to ban pink slime from school lunches, despite the fact it helps make burgers leaner.
As the old saying goes, you’ll never eat sausage again if you watch it being made.
The US Dept of Agriculture says 300 billion servings can’t be wrong, that there is nothing wrong with pink slime other than it sounds disgusting. Folks, much of our food chain includes nasty things like butchering animals that have been grown or penned in semi-barbaric conditions, or funneling plant-based foods through processing pipelines that can contaminate them with deadly pathogens or spread ones picked up naturally. Pink slime is processed beef that is passed through ammonia gas to reduce germs and make the results safer, though one would think it had been soaked in floor wax remover. Are there any health risks for using it? None have been identified so far. In fact, mixing pink slime into ground beef has helped reduce the fat content, thereby making the results leaner and supposedly better for you. Media reports have latched onto the ammonia, ignoring that supermarket ground beef is frequently treated with carbon monoxide gas to make it redder and therefore more appealing to shoppers.
Next time you break open a pack of ground beef, note how the inside meat is brownish, while only the outside is red or pinkish.
The amount of CO is small (0.4-0.5%), but is it safe? Do you want your meat gassed this way? It doesn’t matter, since the beef industry persuaded the Food & Drug Administration in 2002 to give the process GRAS status (generally regarded as safe), despite concerns it masks spoilage. The FDA insists carbon monoxide processing doesn’t effect spoilage odors, but GRAS status means retailers & processors do not have to disclose it on labels.
The fall-out from “slimeaggeddon” includes the bankruptcy of meat processor AFA, who along with Beef Products, Inc., has been in the news over pink slime. The company hopes Chapter 11 will protect it while attempting to stay in business.
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