re: 70% of supermarket ground beef contains "pink slime"

I started buying all my ground chuck at the butcher shop down the street, where it is actually ground chuck.

When handling and eating it is a totally different product than the prepackaged grocery store mess. Made my wife and I like ground meat again.

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What's to explain all the chains located in white areas, and propped up by whites in this city if the black population is the reason we're so addicted to fast food?

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chains and fast food are 2 completely different things

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that's kind of a silly argument, though

"pink slime" is just another boogeyman until objective, non-biased evidence comes out against it

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You enjoy being a bit of a gadfly, don't you?

BTW, whether or not you can find a study on this specific item, they the frick would want to eat cheap filler shite when you can buy pure ground beef?

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it’s pink, therefore it’s meat

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That's the kind of logic that made Pizza a vegetable

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And we want the government to be in control of our healthcare?????

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no kids would die from e-coli in a Happy Meal

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Is this some kind of outbreak that I'm not hearing about? How many kids have died from happy meals because of e-coli?

I bet it isn't many, but you damn sure have a major health issue with half our population being overweight from eating shite all day.
That is far more of a concern to me than e-coli.

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"pink slime" is just another boogeyman until objective, non-biased evidence comes out against it

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you are so lame.

I don't want to eat nor pay for it no matter what the "objective" evidence may suggest

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AgGator

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Thanks for the input. I did read the blog post you linked. May I ask some questions, since you seem to be more in tuned with the industry than the rest of us?

1) Do you consider the "lean finely textured beef" to be a different product than the "fresh ground beef" it supplements, and if so, why would the industry object to appropriately labeling the percentage of each on an individual package?

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this was a call for us to essentially put on a label that we are adding beef into our ground beef.

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Well...yes. The post readily admits the LFTB is created through an interventional step in the process. The above statement seems to be saying that all "beef", no matter the processing, should be considered equal in the minds of the consumers as long as it falls within the legal processing guidelines of your industry. "Adding beef to our beef" seems oversimplified when considering that beef1 and beef2 are processed entirely in different ways. You don't see how that distinction may be important to some consumers, despite the relative (confirmed) safety of each product?

2) What was the primary motivation for developing this process in the first place?

My assumption is increased effeciency. Your industry wanting to make sure that you can feed as many people as possible with a finite resource. Which I, in theory, have no problem with. But it's just further processing of the product. It's another step away from acquiring the beef in it's purest form. The ammonia processing results from potential eColi infection. eColi infection results from corn based feed and living conditions. Corn based feed is utilized for increased muscle/fat yield (and corn subsidies, but thats another thread). Increased muscle/fat yield is neccessary due to production quantities and demand. All these steps were taken as a result of financial and economic realities. NOT to improve the quality of the product, but to more effeciently utilize the resources at your disposal. Am i far off in my assumtion?

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In the last 50-60 years we have made huge advances in efficiency, health, and overall management to produce a safe, cheap, and wholesome product through the use of SCIENCE backed technologies and research. These have made us victims of our own success since a small percentage of us produce the food for everyone and we therefore deal we an often misinformed consumer.

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I don't consider a consumer that desires a product different from yours to be "misinformed". In fact, the "misinformed" consumer is your primary base. Maybe not misinformed, but at least apathetic with regard to how th meat ends up in their refrigerator. For some people, the process matters. Thus i don't understand the resistance to identifying the process through appropriate labeling.

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I think it's unfortunate that in today's world of social media one "whistle blower" can give an entire industry a black eye by reporting fallacies while knowing the average consumer won't bother to check on things for themselves.

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Well, thats why we have places like this. To find people like you, and help us to become more informed.

3) Why do you think the TWO whistleblowers maintain the the product is a "substitute, not fresh ground beef"? While the blog you linked says

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It is 100% wholesome, safe, real-meat beef.

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Where is the disconnect between the two parties?


TIA for any answers. And if anything I wrote is completely ignorant, I have no doubt you'll let me know.

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What is your opinion on the existence, or not, of objective reality?

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objective reality exists

1 + 1 = 2, for instance

I have never really figured out how to do the quotes thing so I will just try to go down the line and hopefully don't miss anything.

1) I personally don't have a problem with it not being included on the label but that might be more attributed to having an idea of where it originate from. It is the exact same as what is in the cut you grind yourself. When a carcass is being fabbed out you trim excess fat off of it. When you do this trimming you will also trim red meat as well since a human is doing it. Also when a bone is removed from a cut there is going to be some meat left on it for the same reason as the fat trim, no one can remove everything perfectly. It is from this that BPI's product comes. In the past we had no way of utilizing this so it went was just rendered with the fat. Now we have of way of separating it. I'm not a meat scientist so I hope I made that make sense.

As to why there would be resistance to not put it on the label, I think it would be the consumer thinking it undesirable because of lack of knowledge on what it is and where it comes from. This is the meat industries biggest weakness I feel. As a whole we are just starting to figure out ways of getting our viewpoint and facts out there. So I guess to wrap it up I have no problem with consumers not wanting to have it in their ground product. The one I worry about are those who don't understand the process or care enough to look it up but only see something they don't recognize and refuse it with no understanding that it is the same thing.

2) The reason for developing this process is the same as any other business decision and that is to make a profit. Packers operate on miniscule margins hence why they have become so large. The only way to make money is to operate on economies of scale. Often times the packer is losing money if you just look at the money made from the carcass we all think of. Where the margin is made is in the hide, offal, etc. So this process is one more way to add value to the carcass. As for the feeding of grain I'll just make a small comment. E. coli is something that has to be prevented in grass fed animals the same as in grain-fed ones. It is a worry in any ground product which is why we cook it all the way through unlike whole cuts. While it is more prevalent in the gut of a grain-fed animal the grass fed animals ground product would be ammoniated in the same way. I handle product from a local custom kill place much more cautiously than that from a big plant. The HAACP protocols at large facilities are very intense and small places are no comparison.

3) To sum it all up I have no problem with consumers not wanting to purchase ground product with finely textured beef. That is whats great about our industry is we can supply anything the consumer wants and they are free to choose. This is due to not producing the commodity product of old when everything was considered the same. My worry is with the consumer that doesn't know or care seeing that and thinking it unsafe or of less quality.

USDA employs hundreds of scientists many of whom have little knowledge of actual production, processing, etc. I am making an assumption here but I wouldn't doubt that those two would fall into this category. I don't doubt their legitimacy as scientists I would just be interested to see in what area they worked. The disconnect could simply be them, just like some of you, don't consider it as high quality and choose not to consume it. Where I do doubt them is they did not do an acceptable job of outlining the process, hence why I doubt their experience in this area. If there is one thing I have learned in grad school it is that just having a PhD does not make you qualified.

To simbo:
I think I covered your question in number 1 of this ridiculously long post. As to the portrayal in Food Inc I think it, just like the ABC news piece, left out the important details of how its done and where it comes from and incorrectly labels it "filler" when it is the same thing as hamburger. That and the industrial music combined to make it not very objective. In the end if consumers decide they don't want this in their food it will go away the same as rBST. It will just come with an associated rise in prices.

I think I covered everything but if you have any questions on welfare, medicine/hormone use let me know. I am always happy to share my perspective.


EDIT: here is a good link to an article by the AMI president
AMI Pres