Pink Slime

[Draca]

That's news to you? Did you see the Food, Inc. documentary yet?

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.

Actually I wonder why they don't reuse the content of the guts as well using the ammonia washing process, if they get away with it in the US anyway.

Thanks,
I haven't seen Food, Inc. It looks pretty depressing but informative. I'll check it out.

 

[Joey McGee]

Your quote above doesn't even call it ground beef. They call it a filler. No one goes to the store to buy beef filler to make gringo tacos. It is not ground beef. It is a salvaged product. It is edible but there should be full disclosure. I would never purposely buy it.

I posted a comment from an article as an example of sentiment from certain experts not as a scientific claim. The facts have already been posted that it's virtually the same nutritional and molecular value. It is beef. Period. There has been no evidence posted in the thread refuting that, only people splitting hairs on definitions. If someone uses the word "filler" as a term for adding something to traditionally produced ground beef, that doesn't change the science of what it is.

An owner of a prized Siberian husky for a dog sled team is going to feed their dog a diet of pure meat, brown rice and vegetables. A good owner would never feed their dog mush like LFTB. If they want the most from their dogs they will go with the highest quality food they can. Why are people treated with less respect? Adding 10-15% low quality filler to protein can not be good for health.

Where is the evidence and scientific rationale for this? There are two problems people have with pink slime. One, it is not edible or nutritious. Two, it is poisoned. Both have been completely refuted. You'll have to come up with a valid reason why it's not good for you, other than the idea it doesn't come from the prettier parts of the cow where you can make big chops with a bandsaw.

The bit about dogs and humans is a baseless argument from emotion. Have you accepted that protestation about it being "meant for dog food" and "poisoned with ammonia" is hysterical fearmongering?

Above all I think it should be labeled on any product it is added to. Give people the choice. The USDA hid this from the American public for a reason. They sold the public out.

The labelling issue is completely separate from the health issue. If you had a definition and a labelling that says clearly "This product contains 90-95% lean ground beef that doesn't come from the prettiest parts of the cow and is separated from fat etc. by a centrifuge. It's perfectly safe, will not make you sick at all, and there is no evidence that it has a negative effect on human health. Plus the nutritional values are virtually the same as traditionally produced ground beef." Yeah ok. But that's not the kind of labelling you would put onto it, would you?

What is actually happening is a bunch of crazy, fearmongering slacktivists are convincing the public that pink slime is dangerous, unhealthy poison. It's a debate about full disclosure, which is a much less serious, while legitimate, debate.

 

[Draca]

Betrayed, by a government agency, USDA, that is suppose to be protecting the public.

This from ABC News:

The “pink slime” does not have to appear on the label because, over objections of its own scientists, USDA officials with links to the beef industry labeled it meat.

“The under secretary said, ‘it’s pink, therefore it’s meat,’” Custer told ABC News.

ABC News has learned the woman who made the decision to OK the mix is a former undersecretary of agriculture, Joann Smith. It was a call that led to hundred of millions of dollars for Beef Products Inc., the makers of pink slime.

When Smith stepped down from the USDA in 1993, BPI’s principal major supplier appointed her to its board of directors, where she made at least $1.2 million over 17 years.

Joann Smith has enough cash now to eat aged prime steak for brunch. I doubt she dines on slime burgers.

 

[WildCat]

An owner of a prized Siberian husky for a dog sled team is going to feed their dog a diet of pure meat, brown rice and vegetables.

If you watch large carnivores around a kill they don't go for the muscle tissue first, they go for the internal organs. Those parts are far more nutritious for them than the muscle meat.

They sure as hell don't eat rice and veggies...

 

[defaultdotxbe]

Cool, I can use a dictionary also!

ground beef

noun
beef that has been ground
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ground+beef


Looks like "pink slime" DOES NOT qualify as "ground beef" to me.

only if "ground" is not the past tense of "grind"

 

[Draca]

The facts have already been posted that it's virtually the same nutritional and molecular value. It is beef. Period.

What is actually happening is a bunch of crazy, fearmongering slacktivists are convincing the public that pink slime is dangerous, unhealthy poison.

“It kind of looks like play dough,” said Kit Foshee, who was a corporate quality assurance manager at Beef Products Inc., the company that makes pink slime. “It’s pink and frozen, it’s not what the typical person would consider meat.”

“BPI is marketing themselves as a pinnacle of safety,” Foshee said. “It’s all lies. It’s all marketing.”

Foshee said. “The finished product is just 6 percent fat, but it’s filled with glands and connective tissue, and is very susceptible to pathogens like listeria, E. coli, and salmonella.”

http://foodwhistleblower.org/blog/2...leblower-kit-foshee-interviewed-on-network-tv


Kit Foshee
Minutes 35.35 - 1:01
February 11, 2011, the Government Accountability Project's Food Integrity Campaign conference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mUg3PZn2A


"According to Amanda Hitt, director of the Food Integrity Campaign, within hours of Foshee's talk, BPI removed entire sections of its website. She also disputes BPI's claims of food safety and says the goal was to offer up cheap filler for hamburgers: "This product was never about safety, it's about economics."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-simon/whistleblower-to-maker-of_b_1345913.html

 

[joobz]

There's an irony to this entire thing. The whole point of ground meat IS to make lower quality meat (tough, gristlely...) more palatable. The physical act of grinding up meat IS a mechanical intervention meant to make more of the available meat useful.

 

[defaultdotxbe]

“It kind of looks like play dough,” said Kit Foshee, who was a corporate quality assurance manager at Beef Products Inc., the company that makes pink slime.

so does ground beef that doesnt contain lean finely textured beef

"BPI is marketing themselves as a pinnacle of safety,” Foshee said. “It’s all lies. It’s all marketing.”

appeal to authority (who is this obviously biased person and why should i trust him over someone else?)

Foshee said. “The finished product is just 6 percent fat, but it’s filled with glands and connective tissue, and is very susceptible to pathogens like listeria, E. coli, and salmonella.”

Same as above, why should i trust this guy who says its filled with connective tissue when other sources say it is not.

also, part of the objection is the use of ammonia gas to kill the pathogens mentioned above. so does the final product have e.coli or not? pick one.

 

[GlennB]

You know we're talking about beef, not chicken?

Yes, of course, but I was talking about the definition of 'meat', (subsequently defined in post #62) and illustrating the point.

Connective tissue has been redefined as 'meat' to allow this kind of process. Connective tissue is the stuff that you typically don't eat, whatever animal it's from.

 

[Draca]

appeal to authority (who is this obviously biased person and why should i trust him over someone else?)

Same as above, why should i trust this guy who says its filled with connective tissue when other sources say it is not.

These are the Wistleblowers:

USDA scientists
Gerald Zirnstein
Carl Custer

BPI's Corporate Quality Assurance Manager for ten years
Kit Foshee


Why wouldn't you give pause to listen to what they are saying? They are industry insiders who know what is going on and are speaking out with no benefit to themselves.

The NYTimes article I posted also showed that LFTB had a much higher testing rate for ecoli and salmonella than normal ground beef.

 

[Brian-M]

I was in the supermarket today and, thinking about this thread I realized I haven't had hamburger for a long time, so I bought myself some mince ground beef.

Yum.

I don't know if the mince ground beef over here contains "pink slime" (can't find anything on Google), but if it's the reason why I could get two thirds of a kilo of tasty mince ground beef for only four dollars (AU), then I'm all for it.

My point was the industry label of 'lean beef trimmings' is a marketing lie.

Which part of the label is the marketing lie? The claim that it's lean (fat removed), the claim that it's beef (bovine meat), or the claim that it's made from trimmings (leftover bits)?

The USDA hid this from the American public for a reason. They sold the public out.

They hid this from the American public? Wouldn't it be more likely that they simply saw no reason to make a deliberate effort to publicize this information? What you're suggesting sounds almost like some kind of conspiracy.

Betrayed, by a government agency, USDA, that is suppose to be protecting the public.

ABC News has learned the woman who made the decision to OK the mix is a former undersecretary of agriculture, Joann Smith. It was a call that led to hundred of millions of dollars for Beef Products Inc., the makers of pink slime.

When Smith stepped down from the USDA in 1993, BPI’s principal major supplier appointed her to its board of directors, where she made at least $1.2 million over 17 years.

Is there any reason to believe that her decision was influenced by the prospect of future employment? Or that at the time she had any reason to expect that one day she'd be offered a position with one of the suppliers to a company that benefited from this decision?

 

[Joey McGee]

These are the Wistleblowers:

USDA scientists
Gerald Zirnstein

Ahem

Every time someone calls former U.S. government scientist Gerald Zirnstein a whistleblower, he cringes a little.

When he coined the term "Pink Slime" to describe the unlabeled and unappetizing bits of cartilage and other chemically-treated scrap meat going into U.S. ground beef, Zirnstein was a microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He made the slime reference to a fellow scientist in an internal - and he thought private - email.

BPI's Corporate Quality Assurance Manager for ten years
Kit Foshee

Kit Foshee: A Reliable Source?

Why wouldn't you give pause to listen to what they are saying? They are industry insiders who know what is going on and are speaking out with no benefit to themselves.

Why aren't you doing your due diligence and looking into both sides?

The NYTimes article I posted also showed that LFTB had a much higher testing rate for ecoli and salmonella than normal ground beef.

Well did you catch that

(eta) " Beef Products said its testing regime was more likely to detect contamination"(/eta) and from wiki "Several days later, the editorial was appended with a retraction, stating that it had incorrectly claimed there had been two recalls of ground meat because of this process, and that "No meat produced by Beef Products Inc. has been linked to any illnesses or outbreaks."

Which still stands. You haven't established that it is dangerous enough to warrant any of this campaign.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

how so? it is composed of trimmings of beef that are 90-95% lean

considering that the AMR process removes the meat and fat from the bone and connective tissue i doubt your perceived change in texture is related, unlike mechanically separated meat (which is required to be labeled separately and is in fact not USDA-approved for beef) there is no gristle in it.

Lean does not mean muscle, it just means less fat. The stuff is full of cartilage and connective tissue (aka gristle).

where have you had problems with texture? earlier in the thread you seemed to indicate the problem beef came from a single store, and you had no problem with meat from a different store

No, I said there was only one store that the hamburger reliably didn't have the gristley texture. That was the organic burger at Whole Foods.

 

[GlennB]

The claim that it's lean (fat removed), the claim that it's beef (bovine meat)....

Well, I wouldn't call cow bone or hoof "beef". Would you?

 

[Joey McGee]

With all of the wild arguments from emotion that have been thrown around, I thought I'd mention that Nancy Donley's beats them all. Plus, she happens to have the facts on her side.

 

[ddt]

Well, I wouldn't call cow bone or hoof "beef". Would you?

From an earlier post by Skeptic Ginger, the USDA definition says:

The meat produced in this manner can contain no more than 150 milligrams of calcium per 100 grams product. Product that exceeds the calcium content limit must be labeled "mechanically separated beef or pork."

 

[Draca]

They hid this from the American public? Wouldn't it be more likely that they simply saw no reason to make a deliberate effort to publicize this information? What you're suggesting sounds almost like some kind of conspiracy.

Is there any reason to believe that her decision was influenced by the prospect of future employment? Or that at the time she had any reason to expect that one day she'd be offered a position with one of the suppliers to a company that benefited from this decision?

Yes, there is absolutely reason to believe she was influenced by both past and present employment and connections.

Carl Custer, a retired microbiologist who spent 35 years in the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service, toured a BPI factory in 2002 while investigating salmonella in ground beef. "We originally called it soylent pink," Custer told The Daily. "We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."

Custer's former colleague Gerald Zirnstein coined the term "pink slime," which was then popularized by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver (2:05 in the linked video).

According to Custer, the USDA ruled that "pink slime" was safe, despite concerns, because a George H.W. Bush appointee who had been president of both the Florida Cattlemen’s Association and the of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association -- undersecretary JoAnn Smith -- pushed it through. Smith now serves on the board of directors of Tyson Foods, the largest chicken, beef and pork processing company in the world.

"It’s more like Jell-O than hamburger, plus it’s treated with ammonia, an additive that is not declared anywhere," Custer said.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/13/1073956/-USDA-to-Serve-Kids-More-Pink-Slime-

 

[Brian-M]

Well, I wouldn't call cow bone or hoof "beef". Would you?

A cow bone or hoof would definitely be bovine, but not meat. I defined beef as "bovine meat" so no, I would not call a cow bone or hoof beef.

Searching definitions I come up with:

Meat: The flesh of animals as used for food.

Flesh: The soft substance consisting of muscle and fat that is found between the skin and bones of an animal or a human.

ETA: And as far as I can tell, the claim that "pink slime" is mostly connective tissue appears to be unfounded.

 

[Brian-M]

Yes, there is absolutely reason to believe she was influenced by both past and present employment and connections.

The quote you provide appears unrelated to this assertion.

 

[Puppycow]

My only beef (get it beef ha ha ha) is the economics of the situation. I am paying for X amount of ground up beef, but in fact only getting Y amount with the balance being made up of filler.

But does the ground beef made with "pink slime" cost the same as "pink-slime-free" ground beef?