03.14.12
CAHY: Innovative meat product
This cartoon on pink slime meat product at DailyKos is worth a laugh.
A longer story, from 2009, in the New York Times on the material shows what corporate American businesses believe to be innovative: making money from garbage.
From time to time DD blog has covered how this blows up in the faces of businesses, semi-regularly making for great outrage in the nation’s newspapers when people are sickened or killed.
Paradoxically, pink slime was “invented” as a cure-all for tainted beef after virulently toxic E. coli in Jack In the Box hamburgers slaughtered about ten people a decade or so ago.
The New York Times story on the nature of pink slime shows its inventor, Eldon Roth of a company named Beef Products, engaged in magical thinking, believing at one point that mixing his ammonia-treated product with any ground meat cleansed the entire batch, perhaps like a disinfectant. (Ammonia gas, NH3, is added to the meat slurry in pipes. I presume that when it hits the moisture in the product, it is solubilized to ammonium hydroxide, a base. This raises the alkalinity of the material, killing bacteria. The problem posed is that to get the alkalinity high enough to absolutely kill everything, the material begins to reek — ammonia having an odor that is generally recognized as repugnant to everyone.)
“This was based on Mr. Roth’s initial prediction that his treated beef could kill E. coli in any meat it was mixed with,” wrote the Times in 2009. “The company acknowledges that its subsequent study found no evidence to back that up …”
An excerpt:
As suppliers of national restaurant chains and government-financed programs were buying Beef Product meat to use in ground beef, complaints about its pungent odor began to emerge.
In early 2003, officials in Georgia returned nearly 7,000 pounds to Beef Products after cooks who were making meatloaf for state prisoners detected a “very strong odor of ammonia??? in 60-pound blocks of the trimmings, state records show.
“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.???
Unaware that the meat was treated with ammonia — since it was not on the label — Georgia officials assumed it was accidentally contaminated and alerted the agriculture department. In their complaint, the officials noted that the level of ammonia in the beef was similar to levels found in contamination incidents involving chicken and milk that had sickened schoolchildren.
The material seems to be marketed primarily to places serving institutional populations — prisons and schools. McDonald’s, noticeably, has dropped use of it.
The New York Times 2009 piece says use of it as a ground meat extender shaves 3 cents off the price of a pound of hamburger in school lunch programs.
The economic crash and reduced state government spending presumably extends to school lunch programs.
Vulture capitalism until so much bad publicity accrues the company causing it is forced into collapse.
Will pink slime’s growing reputation as, well, pink slime, ever finish Beef Products in the US? Hard to say.
A more pro-active consumer protection stance by the government would be needed.
Christoph Hechl said,
March 14, 2012 at 11:44 pm
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A more pro-active consumer protection stance by the government would be needed.
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Actually on this occasion, i disagree:
I aggree, that industrial food is a terrible thing, and personally i believe, that the entire food industry is fubar, but the resulting problem is an educational one.
With people who are unable and/or unwilling to prepare their own meals and who actually have not only “forgotten the taste of bread”, but also most other basic ingredients, except sugar and salt, the industry delivers convenient products which will keep you (kind of) alive.
From early age on kids need to become accustomed to food without any additional aromas to train their taste. Learning to cook should be taken far more seriously, since this is imo the most basic survival knowledge you can gain.
The governments part in this should be to make sure, that kids get this kind of education, and probably force industrially produced food to be clearly labeled as such, but unfortunately the latter is never going to happen and the former will never be taken seriously, except by those who will teach their children themselves anyway.