04.03.12
Going down with pink slime
Some weekend quotes worth repeating, from the losing campaign to re-invigorate the image of pink slime. It’s easy to make jokes about the p.r. — ‘it’s un-American to not like pink slime’ or some variation on it. Further, subversion of pink slime is a conspiracy needing Congressional investigation.
Perhaps there could be something like the House Un-American Activities Committee called up, maybe called the House Investigation into the Liberal Gay Anti-Meat Agenda to Discredit Patriotic Finely Textured Beef.
From the wire:
“It’s clear this is a safe product,” [Iowar governor] Branstad said. “It’s a lean product, it helps reduce obesity and there is a spurious attack being levied against it by some groups. You can suspect who they might be. They are people who do not like meat.”
Reports over weekend showed that Beef Products’ top executives and workers have given $820,750 to congressional and presidential candidates over the past decade, with all but $28,400 going to Republicans. Branstad, a Republican, received $150,000 over the past two years from people tied to Beef Products, his spokesman Tim Albrecht said Monday.
Pink slime production has taken a huge hit.
By the numbers, from the Great Falls Tribune:
Beef Products’ plants in Iowa and Kansas each produced about 350,000 pounds of lean, finely textured beef per day, while the one in Texas produced about 200,000 pounds a day.
With these plants off-line, that 550,000 pounds/day of the stuff zeroed out.
Other manufacturers of pink slime, like Cargill, will not close plants because of the loss of demand.
“Cargill doesn’t plan closures or job cuts as it scales back output of finely textured beef at two plants in Texas, one in Nebraska and one in Kansas, Mike Martin, a spokesman for the Minneapolis-based company, said today in an e-mailed statement,” reads one newspaper here.
Interesting bit from an editorial run in Minnesota:
The resulting revulsion has caused grocery stores to say they won’t carry meat containing the product, and many schools, when given the option, are opting out.
The resulting loss of demand for the product affected Beef Products Inc., which has operations in Texas, Kansas and Waterloo, Iowa. Two hundred people lost their jobs.
Boyle, acting to defend the industry, used a press release to rail against the news media.
“Congratulations, ABC World News,” Boyle stated. “Your relentless coverage and uninformed criticism of a safe and wholesome beef product has now delivered a hook for yet another nightly news broadcast … The frenzy of misinformation that has swirled during the last several weeks gives new meaning to Winston Churchill’s great quote, `A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.'”
Feel sorry for the beef-packing industry if you care to. Certainly workers who at least temporarily lost their jobs as the result of the controversy are in a tough spot.
However, the people who may ultimately pay the greatest price for this product _ created simply to add a few pennies of extra profit per pound _ are the cattle producers who have worked so hard to build beef’s image …
Boyle’s tirade aside, consumers are indeed always right. They don’t want to eat “pink slime” or “finely textured ground beef” treated with ammonia. The media and misinformed scientists didn’t cause this debacle. Foisting a product on an uninformed public did.
We are left to hope that beef producers aren’t damaged by the fallout.
Pink slime is yet more mess proving that those who manufacture odious things in America cannot be made to see them that way, even when their corporate noses are rubbed in it by mass opprobrium.
A relatively recent ‘innovation,’ pink slime only exists because Jack In the Box killed a bunch of people over a decade ago with E. coli-tainted hamburger. Pink slime was subsequently developed as a low cost ammonia-sterilized product taken from the more microbe-contaminated parts of the animal, later pushed and peddled as a meat sanitizer.
Of course, there have always been ways to provide beef not contaminated with killer E. coli. But it costs more and the profit margin is decreased.
A picture of the hamburger/taco stand DD frequents a couple times a week, Bobby’s, where beef is always on the menu.
“They are people who do not like meat, eh?”