Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef
You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few years (thanks, Bu****hanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:
According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."
This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage," and turned into "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips".
Thus saving THREE CENTS a pound off production costs. And making the company, Beef Products Inc., a fortune. $440 million/year in revenue. Ain't that something?
- jennifer poole's diary :: ::
And to emphasize: this pink slime isn't just in fast food burgers or free lunches for poor kids:
With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.
Bush's U.S.D.A. also allowed these "innovators" to get away with listing the ammonia as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also OKd the processing method -- and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general public -- strictly based on the company's claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.
Because the ammonia taste was so bad ("It was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia," said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. "I’ve never seen anything like it.") the company started using a less alkaline ammonia treatment, and now we know -- thanks to testing done for the school lunch program -- that the nasty stuff isn't even reliably killing the pathogens.
But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.
In July, school lunch officials temporarily banned their hamburger makers from using meat from a Beef Products facility in Kansas because of salmonella — the third suspension in three years, records show. Yet the facility remained approved by the U.S.D.A. for other customers.
Presented by The Times with the school lunch test results, top [U.S.D.A.] department officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.
The New York Times article today has a rather innocuous headline, "Safety of beef processing method is questioned."
I'd say this quote from the U.S.D.A. department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, who called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues, represents the situation better: "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."
I've been thinking about an action item on this issue, and I've got three ideas: a. write Michelle Obama through this web form: http://www.whitehouse.gov/... or snail mail: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500; 2. print out the NY Times article and give it to the manager of your local supermarket, and ask them if they sell any kind of ground beef that doesn't contain this "pink slime" or if their butchers will grind meat fresh for you; 3. just stop buying the damned stuff altogether.
One more reason people should seek local farms to purchase their meat from. Corporate meat production isnt healthy on numerous levels...this is merely one of them. Support local and smaller businesses...they tend to treat the animals better as well as providing a healthier better product to the consumer.
'would rather get gunned down than dumbed down...K'naan
(i rarely eat hamburger, and if i do, i buy the stuff they grind in the meat department at the local grocery store - never the commercially packaged "chubs".... just because you really don't know what's going in there..)
jeris
To live would be an awfully big adventure -- Peter Pan
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In the end, it shows what they do to little old farmers who try to do things the old fashioned way, and it made me cry.
I was watching with one eye closed for awhile, because I simply can't tolerate the blood and guts stuff they show sometimes. This movie didn't have all that, thank goodness. The worst thing it showed was an organic farmer cutting a chicken's head off.
The take home message from this film was there IS something we can do about it. When enough people use their voice, changes get made. Please watch it, and share it with your friends and family.
It is what it is...for a long time I felt "ignorance is bliss - I don't wanna know", but I just can't ignore this stuff anymore. Just because I don't know what's going on, or don't believe what I'm told, doesn't change a thing. Time to educate ourselves. Bottom line - NO ONE is protecting us anymore. Those who try, get squashed.
Bottom line - NO ONE is protecting us anymore. Those who try, get squashed.
Thats the absolute TRUTH! The govt and agencies created to stand between those who seek profit (regardless of the cost to the community) and us the community no longer do their jobs. They have been purchased by the very people we need protection FROM.
We cant just count fat grams, protein grams and carbs....we need to look at the entire picture of what we put into our mouths due to what they put in the foods.
Notice how they didnt have to list ammonia as an ingredient even though it IS an ingredient...there are also numerous names for MSG which makes it hard to avoid it even when we check the label for it.
The whole point of listing ingredients was so that consumers could be informed on what they were eating but now they just give ingredients "new names" that will mislead us....so what happened to our right to be informed about whats in our food? Why do they get to rename ammonia when they put it into our food?
'would rather get gunned down than dumbed down...K'naan
size 8, life is great
