There is a great Jamie Oliver episode talking about the Green Slime - and to me it doesn't really look or sound all that tasty, to be honest.
To the camera, he describes the meat trimmings as ****, as in "get rid of that ****". Good to see him maintaining an unbiased and professional approach to the issue right from the start.
He shoves buckets of meat trimmings in peoples faces to get camera shots of their disgusted reactions. Of course, you could get the same disgusted reaction by presenting them with buckets of kidneys in the same conditions. That wouldn't be any reason not to eat a steak-and-kidney pie.
Around 2:12 he says "
Now first things first, this is how I imagine the process to be".
Imagine? That hardly inspires confidence.
Then he puts the meat in a front-loading washing machine. I don't have a problem with that, he makes it clear that they don't actually put the meat in a washing machine, that he's just using it to represent a centrifuge.
It seems a good idea to me, using a centrifuge to separate meat from fat instead of letting it go to waste. If you're just going to use the meat for hamburger, who cares if the process results in it getting squished to mush?
Then there's the ammonia. He pulls out a big bottle labelled "Ammonia" with a giant skull and crossbones on it, and pours it into the meat. (Where do you even find a bottle of ammonia that looks like that?) And then pours water into the meat, claiming they mix the ammonia with water, but he doesn't know the exact proportions. Then he mixes it all together, drains it an grinds it, and presents the result as what comes out of the factory.
But first off, ammonia is a gas, and the liquid ammonia you buy at the shops consists of ammonia gas that's been dissolved in water. So there's no need to add water to the ammonia he's using, it's already mixed.
And according to Wikipedia they use ammonia
gas in the process. They don't use ammonia dissolved in water, or any water at all. There's nothing to drain from the meat because it's
gas. What he shows us would leave significant quantities of liquid ammonia in the meat, which would likely be harmful to eat. But the real process would leave only trace amounts. And there's already trace amounts of ammonia all around us, in rainwater, seawater, in plants, etc.
So I still don't see the problem.
The whole thing appears to be more of an appeal to emotion, rather than any rational objection.
(And why even refer to it as "slime" if not for emotional reasons? The product he presents to the audience doesn't resemble slime to me.)
Until you discover what they use as fertilizer on organic vegetable farms...
Compost.
(And manure.)
