One of the reasons for the blog’s interest in “pink slime” comes from experience working with microorganisms that produced collagenase, an enzyme that degrades the connective tissue protein, collagen.
To do rapid qualitative screening for collagenase production, or just to quickly and cheaply assay for the presence of the enzyme in samples, we used large amounts of fetal calfskin collagen.
And the way it was prepared is not too dissimilar from how Beef Products, or corporate America, processes garbage into a food product of marginal value.
Our collagen source had to be replenished once every year and a half so. That involved getting the hide from a freshly slaughtered fetal calf.
A local slaughterhouse provided them, free, I think. Maybe it’s all used as profit margin now.
The fetal calf hide would be put in a plastic bucket of water with a small amount of microbial growth inhibitor thrown in. It would be allowed to sit for a day or two. This would loosen it up, making the hair easier to debride.
We let it rot a little, so to speak.
Everytime the lab did this there would be a new batch of student assistants and one would be “volunteered” to help prepare it.
The hide would be taken out of the vat, put on an aluminum table/sink, and the hair removed with scrapers. If it was the first time you ever did it, you gagged a lot. The smell was not pleasant and you either got used to it, or breathed through your mouth, or suffered until your gag reflex got burned out for the day, or something like that.
Scraping the hair off the hide and rinsing it took about an hour.
Another couple hours were spent cutting the hide — now looking like what it was, pink flesh — into strips. Then the strips were slowly fed into a coarse meat grinder to make chunks. The work took most of the morning, or afternoon, depending on when you started.
The chunks were thrown into big vats of acetic acid. The acetic acid vats were then kept in a cold room for years, serving as the reservoir of collagen which was, when it started, in the flesh.
Acetic acid rendered the collagen into a slow-flowing gel after a week or two. When one needed a quantity for lab work, one took a beaker, dipped it into the vat of chunks, took out some, and squeezed the chunks through a cheese cloth.
The collagen gel was expressed, caught in another beaker, the remnants of the acetic acid dialyzed away with phosphate buffer.
When the gel collagen was ready you could pour it into a glass or plastic petri dish and put it in an incubator at body temperature. There it would firm up into a solid white layer of what sort of looked like very white, slightly quivering shiny flesh. It would have been great in horror movies.
Typically, one could put little round assay pads on the plate, impregnate the pads from samples drawn from liquid growth medium from bacterial samples of interest, and wait for a couple hours.
If collagenase was present the collagen would clear (dissolve, actually) into protein fragments and water around the pads, leaving a halo.
If you left the collagen plate in the incubator long enough, it dried out, leaving a fairly tough circle of dried insoluble cross-linked collagen which, to the touch, felt a bit like paper.
“Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings,” or “pink slime” reminded me of fetal calfskin collagen. It was not a food but it was also, loosely speaking, a meat trimming.
The marine bacteria with which we worked found it very nourishing. And the acetic acid, like ammonia with “pink slime,” kept it microbe free before use.
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.
“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
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.
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,??? which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.??? In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
“Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence,” writes Greg Smith, former Goldman Sachs employee.
And this bit of unintentional hilarity:
My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts.
A bronze medal in ping pong in the Maccabiah Games. Really! Oh, that’s so special and precious. A mighty man was he.
Now for the million dollar book offer and tour of tv news programs.
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.
Unless you’re working for an arms manufacturer, some disruptive digital revolution company stuffed with annoying tech nerds working to destroy the livelihoods of others, or in financial services, you’re permanently on the downward slope of employability.
DD’s going out on a pretty strong limb here to assert the US economy will never revive substantial employment for the middle class. Retail, food service and jobs as hospitality workers for the tourism business won’t refloat the American dream.
So the country will continue its slide into not making anything anyone really wants in the wider physical world except weapons and some cars.
How do I know?
An incessant barrage of news articles on how to make money on the side.
There is an unintentional black humor to these pieces since they literally involve squeezing blood from stones.
What’s the number one way to quick money in this story?
Sell blood! Maybe you’ll make an extra $25 to $35 a month!
The next recommendation? Be a guinea pig. Sign up for clinical trials of unapproved drugs.
This is like being a prostitute, only it pays less, is somewhat more hazardous and lacks the small satisfactions that might come from knowing you’re attractive and effective enough to be a streetwalker and can kick the john out when you’ve collected the cash money and done the service. In fact, it’s a good argument for the legalization of the world’s oldest profession.
As a boost to employment opportunities, of course.
Also on the list — liquidation. After being put out of work by corporate America, you can sell of all your things at next to nothing prices on two of the boom-boom revolutionary companies in US net tech, eBay or Amazon, and make a few extra bob.
And remember the bit at the top of the piece on disruptive technology service firms and how good it is to work for them? Building their business models on technology that enables the haves to use the network to wipe their feet on the have-nots, you can join the global slave labor pool through them, doing anything someone can think of for a few pebbles and a handful of dirt:
“Still, you can use the Internet to make extra cash. You can provide product research on sites like SurveySavvy.com for anywhere from $1 to $15 per survey, or perform quick menial tasks like tagging images for a few cents each on Mechanical Turk. You can also use the Internet to find offline jobs in your area (like bartending or short-term work as a personal assistant) at Zaarly, where some gigs are worth $100 or more.”
EBay transformed the way people sold vintage trinkets online. Craigslist changed the way people bought new sofas and hunted for apartments in their towns. A new start-up called Zaarly hopes to alter the way people outsource simple errands and tasks …
Bo Fishback, the chief executive and founder of the company, said the most exciting piece of the news was that the company was also gaining Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and the former chief executive of eBay, as a board member …
The site works by letting people post requests for an item or service, and then lets other people, businesses and companies bid to fulfill those needs. Once an agreement is met, Zaarly connects the two parties so they can complete the deal. People can either pay in cash, or through Zaarly’s payment system.
Automated bad publicity. I like it. So I still want to know when they’ll be put out to pasture so they can get back to burning ants with magnifying glasses and engineering applications to pull the wings off flies.
As told Sunday here, the military non-lethal weapons directorate rolled this out for journalists in yet another attempt to fellate the dead dog back to life.
Over the last decade, the US military’s pain ray — a clumsy weapon that uses millimeter waves to burn the outer skin layer of targets by making the water molecules twitch — has been a public relations disaster.
No one wants to see their career go down in flames over it, accused of torturing civilians. Sent to Afghanistan, it was withdrawn without being used. One can only imagine how popular it would be there now, with what looks like the entire country, except for the paid toadies, up in arms over the American presence.
A sensation of unbearable, sudden heat seems to come out of nowhere — this wave, a strong electromagnetic beam, is the latest non-lethal weapon unveiled by the US military this week.
“You’re not gonna see it, you’re not gonna hear it, you’re not gonna smell it: you’re gonna feel it,” explained US Marine Colonel Tracy Taffola, director the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, Marine Corps Base Quantico, at a demonstration for members of the media.
Taffola is quick also to point out the “Active Denial System” beam, while powerful and long-range, some 1000 meters (0.6 miles), is the military’s “safest non-lethal capability” that has been developed over 15 years but never used in the field.
It was deployed briefly in Afghanistan in 2010, but never employed in an operation.
The technology has attracted safety concerns possibly because the beam is often confused with the microwaves commonly used by consumers to rapidly heat food.
“There are a lot of misperceptions out there,” lamented Taffola, saying the Pentagon was keen to make clear what the weapon is, and what it is not.
The Pentagon has not yet decided to order any of the ADS system, but Taffola said they would be ready if asked.
From where I stand there’s little misperception. It’s viewed as a weapon for use in torturing unarmed civilians. And it has no application against an armed angry crowd, as opposed to journalists who, over the years by virtually hundreds, have gamely consented to be shot by it in return for a story.
More recently, it’s maker — Raytheon — has tried to peddle a smaller version into California prisons, where it could be used to shoot prisoners rioting in an enclosed room.
And it would seem fairly obvious its makers saw an opening for revival when the OWS crowds hit streets nationwide late last year. (DD blog wrote on the non-lethal arms peddlers being ready for this, here.)
It would also appear obvious the same people would be advocates for its use against Afghans rioting over the burning of Qurans.
The pain ray’s most remarkable property has been the doggedness of its salesmen. For over a decade they, along with a considerable number of journalists, have tried to sell this odious thing onto Americans streets and the desperate places of the world. And they have, somewhat surprisingly, failed again and again at it.
The pain ray has been in newspapers, magazines, on the Internet and on television, from 60 Minutes to Futureweapons on cable, all to no avail.
Yet.
So my question, perhaps rhetorical, is when will the people pushing it be, justifiably. reassigned or fired?
Look guys, you’ve had long enough. Can’t you just go back to burning ants with a magnifying glass or something?
Krugman took up the business media’s yen for comparing how things work in some part of Paphlagonia, and then loudly proclaiming that the place with the insignificant population means something as compared to where large majorities of Americans live.
So Krugman takes on a piece in the Wall Street Journal, one claiming North Dakota could be a lesson for California because of an alleged soaring economy.
This is all about the minor oil boom in the Bakken Shale, one which continually spawns stories about how that’s where all Americans can go to get high-paying jobs. These stories always center around Williston, which because of the oil boom, has expanded from 15,000 to 30,000.
Williston, even expanded, is still only a fifth the size of Pasadena.
“Workers are making $120,000 a year in Williston,” reads this representative piece. This is made to seem remarkable. For a small town, it is. But in comparison with a place like Pasadena, there are more people here earning more that what is earned in Williston, no boom, and it has been so for a very a long time.
Nevertheless, insists one of the new denizens of Williston: “The world has changed, you just can’t make it with a normal job anymore.”
The subtext, of course, is if we all migrate to Paphlagonia to mine oil shale, our problems are solved.
“Williston sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output,” reads the Wall Street Journal piece ridiculed by Krugman. “This once-sleepy town is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald’s …”
Krugman notes North Dakota is, essentially, a speck of fly shit compared to California.
[Following] a link to Allan Meltzer led to to a report that’s bad even by current WSJ standards: Stephen Moore telling us to compare California with North Dakota to see what works economically. Because a resource boom in a state whose total population is basically that of one neighborhood in LA, as compared with a slump caused by the mother of all housing bubbles and its aftermath, totally shows that free markets rool.
Incidentally, California’s job gain since the bottom in 2009 is, if I’m not mistaken, bigger than the entire adult population of North Dakota.
At Secrecy blog Steve Aftergood has posted the testimony of William McRaven, overall commander of global US Special Operations.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services committee, McRaven emitted statements that with only a little translation, perfectly encapsulate the American strategy of Bombing Paupers.
As Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations attempt to franchise their ideology and violence globally, we will likely remain engaged against violent extremist networks for the foreseeable future.
Newspeak translation: We now operate under a mandate to attack trivial collections of people who we deem to be potentially annoying in the destitute places of the world from now until whenever.
“The direct approach is characterized by technologically-enabled small-unit precision lethality, focused intelligence, and interagency cooperation integrated on a digitally-networked battlefield…. Extreme in risk, precise in execution and able to deliver a high payoff, the impacts of the direct approach are immediate, visible to the public and have had tremendous effects on our enemies’ networks throughout the decade,” reads another bit from the testimony at Secrecy blog.
Put another way, it’s the focused application of killing technology and wealth against those who have none, a bottom global class with different skin color and religion which cannot threaten the country’s existence but inclusive of some miscellaneous bad people. None of whom we can abide. And all because of one very bad day a decade ago.
Over the weekend some snob at The Atlantic went Tom Friedman, marveling at the alleged innovation of the Presto, an app to rid restaurants of people who already earn crap.
The young Presto innovator, Rajat Suri, takes the Atlantic writer to a restaurant with the machine installed.
Called Calafia, it’s in the nation’s high button district, where all the most brilliant are, Palo Alto.
It’s where even food has been innovated upward, the writer letting us know the restaurant is the creation of “Google employee 53,” who also peddles his Food 2.0 cook book there.
[You’re] retracing the footsteps of giants. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were once spotted talking shop there. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all frequent the place …
“I love a quail egg, so I agree to order that,” informs the writer, Alexis Madrigal. Now they don’t offer that at Bobby’s on El Molino!
Rajat Suri’s innovation turns the restaurant into a glorified automat.
Like so many innovative things from America in 2012, it does it by being disruptive technology, antagonizing newspeak for stuff that reduces or eliminates the wages of people who already earn very little, using programming to transfer what’s left of the spoil to people who already make a very good living.
Technology, in other words, to squeeze blood from stones for the benefit of the so-called much-betters.
From the Atlantic piece:
“It costs about a dollar a day per table, it can even go lower depending on if you have sponsors involved because all the alcohol companies want to get involved,” Suri says. “For that, they get about $6 a day per tablet in increased sales. That’s extra desserts, appetizers, drinks. They get about another $5 in extra table turns. If you can fit in one more table per night, that’s worth a lot of money. And some restaurants, though not Calafia, get about $4, $5 extra because they choose to save labor.”
… And, if the restaurants choose to cut some employees because they have an automated ordering system, that trims a bunch of costs, too.
The minimum wage is apparently too high in Palo Alto, according to Suri, the Presto’s maker: “In San Francisco, the cost of labor is $10 an hour, the highest in the country for staff … So if you can reduce 10 percent of your staff, it’s just a huge win.”
A huge win.
Those who retain their low-paying jobs will be better off, the man claims. This is because he claims people tip “better” through the machine. It also needs to be mentioned lots of places don’t actually pay even minimum wage to waiter staff.
Vendor claims, ah, always anchored in the bedrock of fact, never in the land of conveniently made-up shit.
“I don’t want people losing their jobs of because of something like this,” one lady customer tells the Atlantic’s journalist.
“It is impossible to ignore that this technology threatens a job class, which through its flexibility and unusual hours, has supported many people trying to pull themselves up through school or a creative career,” concedes Madrigal.
A less polite way of putting it is to call the Presto yet another trivial piece of app technology that enables those who have it to make money through wiping their feet on a class of those who always have bad things done to them. And calling it progress.
One similar attempt at this, except on a much larger scale, was the push to get self-checkout into supermarkets, the idea being that checkout staff could be reduced on the backs of shoppers.
It’s been in Pasadena at a couple stores — Albertsons, Whole Foods — and hasn’t been particularly successful. A lot of people don’t like to use them and, consequently, there has been no obvious impact on employment.
Plus, people still use cash money, which renders them not so useful, particularly at a run of the mill place like Albertsons.
