What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

ABC didn't coin the term, incidentally. It was coined by a regulator at the FDA some years earlier.

The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the social class of who eats what.

Advanced meat recovery is the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating, allowing us to make use of almost every gram of edible meat on a carcass. If we're going to keep eating meat, we should celebrate advanced meat recovery in the same way that foodies celebrate unfashionable cuts or offal meat. We don't, because recovered meat is cheap and therefore has negative signalling value. The kind of people who buy grass-fed organic beef would never dream of knowingly eating "pink slime" or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that would otherwise go to waste.

Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean beef, because it is lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured beef, but it's widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily substituted by citric acid in this application. If you're concerned about health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to get more meat from every carcass.

(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)

In the search for efficiency, the market for X bifurcates into two extremes: the cheapest thing that can be called X, and the boutique specialist X.

If you live in a poor to middling area, the chances are you only have the cheapest X available to you. Never mind about boutique X being more expensive - it's probably in a completely different part of town. If you have a car, you might be able to make a trip to where they have boutique X - but you might not even have time. (I know that's the biggest limitation on me visiting a butcher - it needs to be something really special.)

If the cheapest X that can be called X has its quality bar raised, then industry can focus on meeting that bar efficiently. And if you lower the bar, then everyone who's making something slightly higher quality will start losing business, until everything is shit.

This applies not just to beef, but bread, restaurants, clothes, consumer goods, etc.

The effect is especially pernicious in areas where branding isn't prevalent. It's for reasons like this that AOC/DOP/PDO etc. exist in Europe, for example - otherwise you'd get random cheese factories trying to sell their wax shavings as Parmesan.

IMO it would be fine to sell "pink slime" as a separate category of meat product, just not as ground beef. I grew up poor - at times, we were vegetarian not by choice, but because meat was too expensive. We never fell back to cheap hamburgers of dubious origin and low meat %. That's why this act removes poor people's choice.

Or you could not allow meat scraps to be called ground beef and trust all ground beef that you buy.

For context this meat wasn’t waste it was used for other products. But by allowing it to be called ground beef it is now more valuable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA

Except for the part where the kids totally no sell his smug act and he just stands there dumbstruck. Those chicken trimmings are... chicken. Human history is the history of us figuring out how to extract more edible bits from the animal than our jaws can along (that's how we got soup, among a lot of other things). The idea that we should only eat the most presentable primal cuts of the animal is bizarre and weird to me.

We generalise a large part of your understanding of the world down to words. When someone (in this case UDSA) redefines ground beef to mean something else that you find icky, of yourself you are upset.

I do think this is a problem since redefining foodstuffs will eventually lead to people distrusting the whole industry.

Ground beef should be parts of beef that have been ground down. Not slabs of defatted chemically treated leftovers. It is a redefinition of a phrase that is directly misleading to customers.

I am all for eating everything from dead animals, if we are to continue eating them. People are fricking squeamish.

A lot of people lack the education to know that many more lack the time, energy and money to make it work. I guess the answer why this should upset you is that it shouldn’t, unless you’re troubled by empathy as many of us are.

Yeah, god forbid food standards agencies get picky themselves about what's in our food, or at least reserve the traditional names of meats for non traditionally produced / sourced foodstuff.

However you can't just ground pure trimmings as that wouldn't be particularly nice to eat, you need some good meat in there as well. The 'pink slime' described here seems to be some process that separates out additional fat using centrifuges in order to make something that fits the official standards for ground beef without the need to add any good meat. It's highly debatable meat that's been that extensively processed should still be considered ground meat.

If anyone wants to buy pink slime, go for it, but I should at least be able to know what I'm buying. This is fraud, and it's aided by the government.

The problem is not that it shouldn't be allowed -- it just shouldn't pretend to be something it's not.

I literally did not know that the pre-packaged ground meat is different from the ground meat you get at the butcher.

So someone can upsell you on ground beef "With No Pink Slime"!

I agree, but in order to be transparent the ingredients and processes would need to be disclosed (ideally on the packaging) and this news seems a step further in the opposite direction.

The bones used to be soaked for hours to get all the goodness out of them and make stock. I dont know if this is much different from the reclaimed meat - apart from the ammonia I suppose. Even now I make stock regularly and get all the yummy left over bits in the pot.

I'd say this "beef" is fake meat -- whether some court agrees or not (that depends on who has the best lawyers and deeper pockets, not on who has the best food).

I'd be OK with companies being allowed to sell all kinds of crap as foodstuff, if they didn't highjack on existing food labels as it's the regular beef people know to fool consumers and paint a picture.

Except people generally were rightfully surprised to learn the basic product they thought they understood contained some modern industrial cost-saving additive.

If that's not news, I don't know what is.

> defamation settlement

There's no evidence ABC were acting with malice or their story was untrue. A settlement just means they wanted out of the argument.

It's not okay if we process the fatty trimmings, heat them, centrifuge them, and then add them to ground beef to lower the fat content to make it look like the product was made from better bits of the animal.

Using more of the animal is a good thing, but misleading customers is not the way to do that.

"When indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it respect.

Do it in a factory [producing a collagen/cartilage slurry cleansed with ammonia; to maximize profits], and all of the sudden it is gross."

And this is coming from an avid kidney pie and liver taco eater.

Impossible Burger tastes the same as that product, and is made via just as industrial a process, so don't switch on those accounts.

You want to stop eating meat? That's a perfectly fine reason! But switching because of LFTB would be pretty silly.