Pink Slime — It’s What’s for Dinner! by Anne Laurie

Here's the story on "pink slime". It's just so yummy!! No wonder you can no longer get a rare burger -- they are afraid it will kill you.

This direct from "Balloon Juice" -- please follow link to original.
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Pink Slime — It’s What’s for Dinner!

by Anne Laurie

ABC News wants to put you off your burger:

Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.”

“Pink slime” is beef trimmings. Once only used in dog food and cooking oil, the trimmings are now sprayed with ammonia so they are safe to eat and added to most ground beef as a cheaper filler.

Zirnstein and his fellow USDA scientist, Carl Custer, both warned against using what the industry calls “lean finely textured beef,” widely known now as “pink slime,” but their government bosses overruled them.

The “pink slime” is made by gathering waste trimmings, simmering them at low heat so the fat separates easily from the muscle, and spinning the trimmings using a centrifuge to complete the separation. Next, the mixture is sent through pipes where it is sprayed with ammonia gas to kill bacteria. The process is completed by packaging the meat into bricks. Then, it is frozen and shipped to grocery stores and meat packers, where it is added to most ground beef…

The LATimes prefers to ‘teach the controversy’, because both sides… :

... Last month, as KTLA reported, McDonald’s decided to cease using the additive in its hamburgers. This decision came after prodding by TV chef Jamie Oliver. On his “Food Revolution,” the disgusted food activist says the additive is made of “all of the bits that no one wants.”

The USDA, however, says the additive is safe to eat. The department is so satisfied with the stuff that it plans to buy 7 million pounds of ground beef containing “pink slime” in coming months for the national school lunch program, the Daily reported on Monday. And that’s created a whole new stink…

Meanwhile, over at the Cattle Network, American Meat Institute President J. Patrick Boyle defended the process as well as the product in an article Thursday, saying the “lean beef trimmings” were “absolutely edible” and that using them ensured that “lean, nutritious, safe beef” did not go to waste.

It would indeed seem great fodder for a snarky British tabloid headline, considering that in the United Kingdom lean beef trimmings are banned for human consumption.

And why would the USDA be so satisfied with the stuff”? Well, school nutrition programs are chronically underfunded—it’s only kids who eat the stuff, mostly poor kids whose parents have no political power—so frugality is important. Also, friends with low standards in the right places:

ABC News has learned the woman who made the decision to OK the mix is a former undersecretary of agriculture, Joann Smith. It was a call that led to hundred of millions of dollars for Beef Products Inc., the makers of pink slime.

When Smith stepped down from the USDA in 1993, BPI’s principal major supplier appointed her to its board of directors, where she made at least $1.2 million over 17 years.

Yeah, the salaries for USDA inspectors are probably chronically underfunded as well. And besides, if the ammonia actually kills E. coli and salmonella, that may be an argument in its favor. From Maren McKenna’s great “Superbug” blog at Wired magazine, “High Levels of Resistant Bacteria on Meat (Again)“:

A new report is out from the federal collaboration that monitors antibiotic resistance in animals, retail meat and people, and the news is not good.

The full title is the 2010 Retail Meat Report from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System. This report is issued by the Food and Drug Administration; the humans one comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the animals one from the US Department of Agriculture. It reports the results of testing on 5,280 meat samples collected in 2010 in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. (Those are sites of state labs participating in a federal surveillance network, FoodNet, plus one volunteer lab, Maryland.)...

The report — which is broken down first by foodborne organism and then by meat type — notes a number of instances where either the percentage of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant, or the complexity of the resistance, is rising…

... [M]ore than half of the ground turkey samples carried E. coli that were resistant to at least three different classes of antibiotics, meaning that, if those bacteria caused a foodborne infection in a person, none of those antibiotic classes would work to cure it. Almost 30 percent of chicken breast and ground turkey samples carried Salmonella bacteria that were resistant to five different classes of antibiotics. Almost 29 percent of ground-beef samples carried Salmonella strains that were resistant to six.

Click the link for more details, and a list with further reading.

And this seems like the right place to recommend a NYTimes article I’ve been saving; Mark Bittman explains why the score stands at “Bacteria 1, FDA 0”:

... It’s not like this is happening without a reason; the little germs have plenty of practice fighting the drugs designed to kill them in the industrially raised animals to which antibiotics are routinely fed. And although it’s economical for producers to drug animals prophylactically, there are many strong arguments against the use of those drugs, including their declining efficacy in humans….

In 1977... the Food and Drug Administration, aware of the health risks of administering antibiotics to healthy farm animals, proposed to withdraw its prior approval of putting penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed. Per their procedure, the F.D.A. then issued two “notices of opportunity for a hearing,” which were put on hold by Congress until further research could be conducted. On hold is exactly where the F.D.A.’s requests have been since your dad had sideburns.

Until [December 2011], when the agency decided to withdraw them…

... A staggering 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to farm animals, mostly, as I said, prophylactically: the low-dose drugs help the animals fatten quickly and presumably help ward off diseases caused by squalid living conditions. The animals become perfect breeding grounds for bacteria to gain resistance to the drugs, and our inadequate testing procedures allow them to make their way into stores and our guts.

The F.D.A. knows all about this; in 2010 the agency issued a draft guidance proposing that big agriculture voluntarily (there’s a non-starter for you) stop the use of low-dose antibiotics in healthy farm animals. “The development of resistance to this important class of drugs,” the F.D.A. asserted, “and the resulting loss of their effectiveness as antimicrobial therapies, poses a serious public health threat.” Good. Nice. But toothless…

Here’s the nut: The F.D.A. has no money to spare, but the corporations that control the food industry have all they need, along with the political power it buys. That’s why we can say this without equivocation: public health, the quality of our food, and animal welfare are all sacrificed to the profits that can be made by raising animals in factories. Plying “healthy” farm animals (the quotation marks because how healthy, after all, can battery chickens be?) with antibiotics — a practice the EU banned in 2006 — is as much a part of the American food system as childhood obesity and commodity corn. Animals move from farm to refrigerator case in record time; banning prophylactic drugs would slow this process down, and with it the meat industry’s rate of profit. Lawmakers beholden to corporate money are not about to let that happen, at least not without a fight.

Bon appetit, everybody