03.15.12
CAHY: Innovative meat product (continued)
A piece from the wires, furnished by ABC News, illustrates the corporate practice of taking what’s functionally garbage and perverting the use of descriptive language to sell it:
ABC News has the learned that on Thursday the U.S. Department of Agriculture will announce that starting this fall, schools will be able to choose whether or not they buy hamburger that contains lean finely textured beef known as ” pink slime …”
“It kind of looks like play dough,” said Kit Foshee, who, until 2001, 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.”
Foshee said that he was fired by BPI after complaining about the process used to make the filler, and the company’s claims about it. Since then, he has spoken out against the product.
J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, defended the practice as a way to safely use what otherwise would be wasted.
“BLBT (Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings) is a sustainable product because it recovers lean meat that would otherwise be wasted,” he said in a statement.
However, the substance, critics said, is more like gelatin than meat, and before BPI found a way to use it by disinfecting the trimmings with ammonia, it was sold only to dog food or cooking oil suppliers.
But Boyle said, “The beef trimmings that are used to make BLBT are absolutely edible” and Janet Riley, senior vice president of public affairs for AMI, said there was no reason to label beef that contains “pink slime.”
“What are you asking me to put on the label, its beef, it’s on the label, it’s a beef product, it’s says beef so we are declaring … it’s beef,” she said.
May things are edible but still best not eaten. Some people eat dog food when they can afford nothing else. Hair, hide and hooves are part of a cow. Are they beef if they are ground finely enough and resuspended as an ammoniac gel?
Therein lies the rub. The parts of the cow used for “pink slime” come from the parts of the cow that used to be tossed away because they were too heavily contaminated with bacteria, coming as they do from on or near the cow’s surface. This is the “why” of ammonia-treated slime, the compound being used to disinfect the material. (It would seem to be even a couple steps further down than the infamous and much-joked about “potted meat product.”)
In the intervening period the product was marketed as a kind of meat extender and disinfectant — falsely so — and has no found its way into 70 percent of packaged ground meat sold in supermarkets.
Obviously, a very large market. And it is unlikely all Americans will immediately learn enough about it to start shunning pre-packaged ground beef, another product of corporate America’s race to the bottom, repackaged as some kind of value-laden gift.
There is only one way to know for certain that “pink slime” is not in your beef: If your meat is stamped USDA Organic, it’s pure meat with no filler.
Otherwise, you can’t know from the packaging because “pink slime” does not have to appear on the label. And the USDA is giving no indication it will force meat packers to lift the veil of secrecy any time soon.
Yesterday’s post pointed to a 2009 NY Times piece that explained such pre-packaged hamburger has regularly been found to be the culprit in mass food contaminations, poisonings and recalls. However, Beef Products’ “pink slime” enjoyed a kind of working exemption from blame.
“Pink slime’s” makers insisted it was ammonia-disinfected and that was all that was necessary to absolve it from corporate responsibility in any cases of contaminated ground beef.
The blog has regularly post items on how corporate America becomes a security threat to average Americans. Mass food poisonings and recalls regularly enuse, because of the overweening pursuit of profits at the expense of safety, good sense, and regard for the final customer
The most recent examples — Jack Decoster’s infamous egg farm/salmonella mills, the salmonella-flavored peanut butter manufactured by Peanut Corp and sold nationwide, and melamine-poisoned pet food.
In all cases, the predatory business model is followed because the penalties or lack of them were affordable to the business as minor costs.
One can almost think of “pink slime” in the same way as Chinese-made melamine. It’s a cheap extender, increasing the profit on hamburger by using something much more worthless to pump up the weight.
“Pink slime,” it stands to reason, already caused food poisonings, if only because it is such junk, it’s alleged disinfectant properties diluted when added to mass batches of pre-packaged hamburger.
Up until now, the product has generally escaped great scrutiny and resulting opprobrium. This may be changing.
Chuck said,
March 18, 2012 at 2:59 pm
There’s a difference between “edible” and “palatable’. Rat feces are edible, but I would balk at making a meal of them.
I haven’t bought any ground beef in years, but I’ve often wondered if that stuff finds its way into sausage (bologna sausage, in particular). Since the USDA has been bought off, you won’t ever see it on a label. As far as I know, BLBT has never been legal in Europe. They probably care about their food.
Whatever happened to rendering plants? I remember that Lever Brothers ran a plant in the South Chicago suburbs (probably fed by the stockyards) and the odor was unforgettable.
A good cook will roast beef bones and use them to make stock. Common things such as toothbrush handles used to be made from boiled bone.
I guess things keep changing.