LTHForum.com

The very first sentence is the key. And here's the photo in proper context.

http://gizmodo.com/5654066/chicken-nugg ... icken-goop

And therein lies the problem. News "reporting" sucks. You can't believe much of it and the parts you can believe often have lots of inaccuracies. Case in point the recent brouhaha over Apple Computer's "sweatshop" factories which took bits of truth and lots of literary "license" and created a narrative out of whole cloth that was misleading and false.

My recollection is that this photo (or one just like it) was originally linked to McNuggets, but it later came to light that it was not McNuggets but instead the "pink slime" ground beef. Are you saying that it is, in fact, the McNuggets? Or are you simply saying that we can't trust any reporting? In any case, I think we've lost the forest through the trees here. Everyone seems in agreement that this kind of processing should be properly identified and labelled. Everyone agrees that consumers can make up their own mind about whether they want to eat this stuff. Some do, some don't. I'm not entirely sure what we're now discussing.

It was the McNuggets of yore, before McDonald's starting using breast meat only (which they started doing in 2003). So it was a moot point when it was first reported. The photo is of mechanically separated poultry and the linked article says that in its first line. Nothing like using a non-representative photo in your alarmist story.

As for what we're now discussing, it's how lack of reliable information is harmful because everybody starts putting a spin on the story until it no longer bears any relationship to "truth."

And what exactly is the truth here Norman? Its sure not what Beef Product's Inc. is blathering about in a series of youtube videos they put out defending their product. My favorite, that the process is really no different than a butcher trimming the fat from a steak. Cue screen shot of centrifuge and zoom quickly past the word "ammonia."

"Highest quality product" indeed. Like telling me a pile of shit is chocolate cake because you put a candle in it and sang happy birthday in French before blowing it out.

_________________
"By the fig, the olive..." Surat Al-Teen, Mecca 95:1"

Def: Pink slime (pink slīm) A colloquial term referring to a gooey meat substance made from meat trimmings treated with ammonia.

But let's continue to split hairs:
Pink slime

Pink slime again

And again

And yet again

LTH is not the best forum to attempt to try to piece together a discussion that's been occurring on a national level for the past weeks. Google it. You'll find a lot of information.

_________________
Local Beet

It's beef. Your repeating centrifuge and ammonia out of context does little to further the dialog. I get it, it's not your cup of tea. I'm not suggesting that it should be. However, when it gets to the point that people are calling it recycled garbage or rotted meat or showing sensationalistic photos of something else entirely then that's problematic.

Yes, it should appear somewhere on a label, but that's about it. The fact that its processing includes heating and centrifuging the fat is not diabolical, it's a way to isolate the meat from fat cheaply and in volume. An ammonia spray may shock you but it's not harmful. I don't see anyone getting up in arms about ammonium hydroxide's use in breadmaking or the use of sodium hydroxide in making bagels or pretzels. People can make things sound as evil or innocuous as their agenda demands but it's not fair to people who just want a straightforward appraisal of a process. There are plenty of people who can't afford $3.99 a pound ground beef and may be willing to use a cheaper product that's of a lesser quality. Suggesting that the practice be stopped because it offends some people's sensibilities is unfair.

Ah, the old strawman. So, who exactly suggested that the practice be stopped?

In the interest of providing information, here is a very measured audio discussion of "pink slime" told mainly from the standpoint of a food scientist (and also involving Louisa Chu). Taken together with other available information, you decide whether you think it's something you'd want to eat.

_________________
Local Beet

If people cannot afford $4 for dinner, well that's really a discussion we should be having in some other forum, no?

I mean before I read what you said carefully, I was gonna pip in and note that the general price for farm burger is $6/lb. Stretched the old fashioned way into say pasta sauce, chili, or meatballs, and you can easily make a meal for a family of 4 from this, but hey, I now realize the bar for reasonable meals is lower than I thought.

_________________
Think Yiddish, Dress British - Advice of Evil Ronnie to me.

The Local Beet's very big list of 2013 Farmer's Markets

Stop by the North Ave. Fresh Market (on North Ave. just East of Ridgeland) a few days before the end of the month and watch what people are buying. On a recent visit about a week before the end of the month I stopped in to grab some milk and noticed many people were checking out with just a small package of baloney and a loaf of white bread. Some of these people are just hoping to stretch whatever they can till the next month begins. It's an eye opener.

_________________
The cake is a lie

I think that this a discussion well worth having on LTH.
I believe the problem is two fold.
First, the general public was not aware it existed and was an additive in many products, including me who I believe is an educated consumer.
Secondly, the product as I understand the prpcess uses meat close the skin which may or may not have contamination which requires treating with ammonia to render safe. I don't like chemicals used to treat any of my food.
We are so concerned over pet food that we grind our own beef for our dog and give diary, yellow and green vegetable supplements withe groun meat. Sometimes we purchase a package of 90% from Sams to feed her when we don' have the time. No longer. I read this am that Sams will offer groun beef without pink slime so evidently there are a number of consumers that feel that they have been lied to by the producers and government or at least not given any information.
I appalud Habibi for bringing this topic to the forefront on LTH and afree with his concerns and position.
I won't attempt to even list the numerous assaults to our health that companies in the name of profit attempt yo foster upon us. Their mantra is, it is not proven unsafe, my retort is, prove that it is safe.-Dick

if someone had sent me the long new york times article linked above and told me it was satire from 'the onion' magazine, i would have believed them, that 's how appalling and funny, in a nauseating way, the topic is.

_________________
"the only things money can't buy are true love and homegrown tomatoes" (guy clark)

Same here. I became concerned with pet food about eleven years ago when my dog was shedding patches of hair due to severe allergies. Vets were of no help because they're mostly trained to medicate (and he wasn't responding to it). Finally, I was enlightened by someone who is very knowledgeable about pet health who pointed out the absolute crap that's in pet food (i.e., meat rendered from diseased and dying livestock is only the tip of the iceberg) and what it was doing to my dog's immune system. After putting him on "human" food, within three months, there was no sign of allergies and his hair was growing back. I cannot believe that 10 years or so later, I have to be alert for these byproducts in human food. It makes it harder to feed even pets safely. I know I repeat myself about knowing the source of your food, but I encourage folks to look to local farms for safe sources of pet food. TJ's poultry is putting out a relatively inexpensive frozen product made of ground backs, livers and various bits. Faith's Farm also has an awesome product sold at Green Grocer. They're not cheap, but in a pinch, if I don't have time to make my dog's food (I also give them a lot of scraps), then this stands in nicely.

_________________
Local Beet

Paulina sells a similar pet food product that is ground up bits of their own scraps.

Marion Nestle has a couple of good books on pet food and the relationship between pet and human food ("What to Feed Your Pet" and "Pet Food Politics"). One of the themes of these books is that the pet and human food systems are intimately intertwined.

If you have a visceral reaction to that, I hope you don't like any kind of emulsified sausage (hot dogs, bologna, mortadella, thuringer, weisswurst, etc) because they all look pretty much like that before they're stuffed into casings and cooked.

I definitely don't like the idea of eating pink slime, especially without knowing it, but to me the only issue is the ammonia. If they have a way to use more of the animal, I think that's great. If we're going to kill animals to eat them, I would much rather have as little waste as possible. If they could make pink slime without the ammonia step, I would be all for it.

Although, thinking more, the reason they're using ammonia is to get rid of e coli contamination. Considering where they come from, I would think natural sausage casings need to be decontaminated from e coli as well, but the cleaning process for those generally uses just salt water (according to wikipedia.) I wonder if it would be possible to make a pink slime-like product using salt in place of ammonia, and if so, what the public reaction would be?

It looks like strawberry icing. I don't see what the problem is.

_________________
i used to milk cows

Natural casings have been deslimed ("slime" in this context is an actual term of art) whereby the mucus layers are mechanically removed leaving behind an essentially non-absorbent casing. In this instance, salt is effective at countering any surface bacteria that may remain. With ground beef it's trickier because the cells have a tendency to absorb the salt (effectively "curing" the meat), retaining more salinity than is desired. You can make beef "jerky" from ground beef with next to no "curing" time because the grinding has exposed so much surface area. I've done this with ground beef and you essentially mix in the cure, immediately roll the mixture out onto sheets and then dehydrate.

There would be no way to extract the salt once added.

I like where you all are going with this. Yes. As a society we need urgently to figure out multiple ways to produce pink slime without ammonia. Perhaps radiation will kill the bacteria. Repeatedly running over the finely textured meat substance with an old Buick might do it too, and would have the added benefit of making it even more finely textured.

"Pink slime, nows the time"

_________________
"By the fig, the olive..." Surat Al-Teen, Mecca 95:1"

I actually don't consider it to be beef at all. It's a by product and should be labelled as such. Beef is cattle meat - not bone, not organs, not skin, not marrow, not hair (etc.). There's nothing wrong with eating any and all parts of a cattle, I regularly do, but it should be labelled honestly. Some places go as far as specifying the cut they're grinding (i.e. ground sirloin, ground chuck) and I consider it to be criminal if something labelled that way actually has by product in it. Sell whatever you want, just be honest about what it is. I would guess it is most likely safe to eat, but I need to learn more about why the use of ammonium hydroxide is banned in Canada and most European countries, but is allowed here.

I gave up buying ground beef from chain grocers over a decade ago because it doesn't taste that great to me. I suspect the inclusion of this stuff is part of what turned me off of ground beef from chain grocers.

I suspect there are other ways they could decontaminate the stuff without ammonia, but I suspect it would be more expensive to use other methods.

_________________
It is VERY important to be smart when you're doing something stupid

- Chris

But this isn't bone, organs or hair, it's beef. Nobody's adding bone and hair to ground beef. As for "decontamination", the ammonium hydroxide is added to prevent contamination. As for Canadian regulation, it's true that they don't allow ammonium hydroxide, but it's false that they don't allow the treated beef trimmings. They use citric acid instead.

I live in Canada. I eat citric acid all the time. As far as possible I avoid eating NH4OH, although it does a great job cleaning my windows. I strongly approve the Canadian agencies which allow citric acid in my food, but disallow window cleaner.

And I've taught intro chem classes in university for years, so I'm not in principle opposed to chemistry. Especially since I've also been a professional wine maker. But sometimes, one accepts certain ways of living better through chemistry, but rejects others. I don't think the rejection is based totally on aesthetics. But, even if it is, maybe that's not a salient objection.

Geo

_________________
Sooo, you like wine and are looking for something good to read? Maybe *this* will do the trick!

so what is it contaminated with? Fecal material. I'd rather not eat it, though I've gotten a fair bit of cow s**t in my mouth a time or two and it didn't seem to do me any harm.

_________________
i used to milk cows

A couple years ago I had the privilege of touring the Vienna Beef factory with Bob Schwartz (Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog) showing us around. We got to watch most of the hot dog making process, including grinding. The starting material seemed to be almost entirely large pieces of actual meat (many long strips I couldn't identify). I didn't see anything remotely weird or horrifying go into the grinders although most of it was quite fatty (no surprise there). You really should want to see your sausages being made.

Agreed!

I was fortunate enough to be on the same tour of the Vienna factory as Rene G, I agree, you really want to see your sausages being made, at least at Vienna.

Vienna Factory




Cathy 2 appears comfortable in her role as Vienna Beef CEO

_________________
Sauce on the side, always, implied, axiomatic..........never a doubt, BBQ sauce without.

Low & Slow

Thanks for the info Rene G. Awesome photos Gary!

So many reasons to love Vienna Beef.

_________________
"By the fig, the olive..." Surat Al-Teen, Mecca 95:1"

I think a couple things have been left out of this discussion. The first is the addition of ammonia to meat products....not just pink slime, but many, many meat products. It's increasingly common. It's also naturally occurring in many, many food products. And, you'll find that its natural level in some foods -- may foods -- excedes total levels (natural + added) in ground beef today.

Leaving pink slime out of the discussion, the ammonia is added to make animal protein safer, and more presentable for longer. When I was a lad the grocery store I worked in ground and packaged our ground beef. Today it is delivered package in air tight containers. That's because it has an artificial environment that keeps it from decomposing and keeps the population of creepy crawlies down. But ammonia is used in chicken processing and just about everywhere else as a safety measure.

There are many parts of animal processing that I think are far more gross than pink slime production. AMR or automated meat revovery whereby robots trim the carcass, often times trimming not beef parts into the finished product. Lots of things far grosser. Slaughtering animals is pretty gross. Cherry picking one aspect as too gross to tolerate...I don't know.

The rapid heating and the cooling of this process is pateurization. I know that the manufacturers were claiming years ago that this product was safer than regular ground beef because of the heating and cooling. I'd like to understand what caused the contamination.

The "rotten meat" comment can't be supported. Like it or not, this is the exact same beef that is in your walmart NY Strips. It's the trimmings. Not stuff swept off the floor.

This technology was funded because the U.S. doesn't produce enough lean beef to satisfy its appetite for hamburger. Hamburger is made from a combination of lean and regular beef. To satisfy this demand the U.S. has been importing lean beef (while exporting other parts of the animal to other countries). This technology was conceived to waste less.

We pretty much each hamburgers and steaks. I understand the comments about Vienna but why do we think it's ok to make so many parts of the animal off limits if we are such big consumers of animal flesh?

We do the same thing with chickens though. We eat predominantly breast meet while the rest of the chicken sails off to Asia.

If you don't like it, or if you don't like greenhouse gases, or if you don't like heart disease, diabetes, and so on....then eat less meat. We consume way too much meat.

If we were talking about what tastes good (our usual topic) I don't think there is any contest here -- fresh ground hamburger just tastes way better. I'm trying to reduce what I buy at WF because of cost, but I'll stop eating hamburger before I buy anything but fresh ground beef. I don't know if it's the slime or the ammonia or something else, but it doesn't taste good, and I'm not eating it.

jlawrence's other post "More Offal Pictures" leads to a wonderful blog where the blogger posts the following thoughts:

"According to Eskimo oral history, animals give themselves to hunters and trappers so that their meat and fur and sometimes bones can be used to feed, clothe and give tools to the Inupait people. And we thank them by using everything on them. We thank them after the hunt. And by "everything" I mean that on a caribou, we eat: all the meat, the head, brain, eyes, tongue (best part), neck, stomach (bible), liver, kidneys, intestines (actually I've never had intestines from caribou before), heart (second best part), and even the little bot fly larvae that nest in the fur, old Eskimos eat those too. We use: the fur for parkas, mukluks, qaitchiaqs, bedding and sled cushions (did you know caribou fur is hollow and will float? Old time life jackets!), the tendons for sinew to sew with, the fat around the rump and stomach for akutuq, the antlers for fishing rods, knife handles, and coat racks (my personal favorite is a towel rack my dad made at camp) and even the hooves are used for something!"

Among the not-very-far fringes (maybe "new" to us but actually very ancient) of the food eating and food procuring world are those chefs who think it a moral obligation to use the entire animal if an animal life is taken. It is "snout to tail" thinking. It seems to me that there is some common ground that could be found between these progressive chefs and those folks that demand different processing techiniques for their meat. How can we define this common ground?

PS: Kudos and props to you, spinynorman for your yeoman's work on this thread! --Joy

You may have one less thing to worry about:

'Pink Slime' Maker Halts Some Plants

_________________
Cathy2

"You'll be remembered long after you're dead if you make good gravy, mashed potatoes and biscuits." -- Nathalie Dupree
Facebook, Twitter, Greater Midwest Foodways, Road Food 2012: Podcast

Joy, with all due respect, this misses the point. The question was never about whether to consume the whole animal.