If you're picky about what's in your ground beef, find a butcher you trust, or grind your own.
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)
I wish this point was brought up more in nutrition discussions. Most of these recent fad diets like keto, paleo, and carnivore are beyond the means of most people in the world. So even if we accept, for the sake of argument (which I don't), that they have nutritional advantages there should be a giant asterisk at the end of the argument.
https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps...
Keto (i.e. any diet that triggers ketones) is a compelling option for numerous reasons, not just epileptics. It’s definitely not a good default for the wider population. And it is of course environmentally and economically inefficient. But ketogenisis is a reality of our biochemistry and shouldn’t be dismissed in the same way as other diets.
Dietary science is at its infancy. Contrary to what most people would assume, we have mountains of anecdotes, mountains of opinions, and very few hard facts. Navigating diet from a fact-first, science-first perspective is deeply frustrating.
it's absolutely a diet that can work for anybody, it does require a fair amount of reading though.
that fad lasted for 50 years, taking that into account it's probably too early to call keto a fad - i barely meet people who even know about it, let alone practice rigorously for any prolonged amount of time.
All kinds of non-diet fads come and go too, even bellbottoms made a couple of comebacks in the decades since the late 60s.
Pink slime contains connective tissue and muscle. There's no way it's equivalent in terms of nutritional value to actual meat. And don't forget it's treated with ammonia, which is the reason it's banned in the first world.
Please consider that using the whole animal is a different thing to labeling the resulting product however they want.
Classism in food is absolutely endemic. A slightly facile but still important example is this paper from the BMJ in 2012. It analysed the nutritional content of 100 supermarket packaged meals and 100 recipes by popular British TV chefs. It found that the ready-made meals contained significantly fewer calories, less fat and more fibre than the recipes. We judge people for living on a diet of microwaveable meals, but switching to home-cooked meals might actually be a retrograde step in terms of nutrition if they follow the recipes of Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson.
Something feels intuitively wrong about that conclusion; that feeling is implicit classism.
I expect this, but I've been disappointed at how we are doing so far as a society.
Except you're flipping the burden of proof. Food product experiments aren't default-safe until proven otherwise.
Class is a red-herring. Wealthy people eat pesticide-free, grass-fed, organic, bpa-free, healthier, or low-preservative fresh food not to signal, but because they are risk-averse.
All food labels should contain exact information on what the product is in these respects, next to the ingredients and nutrition information.
Nor do I understand the classism argument - cooking food from raw is enormously cheaper. Maybe it's different in America, but in the UK £10 worth of ready meals will feed you for a few meals, while £10 worth of judiciously selected ingredients will feed you for a week.
We know that many species of fish contain potentially toxic levels of mercury. The FDA advises pregnant and nursing mothers to avoid those species of fish to minimise the risk of brain damage to their child. Why is there no stigma about eating swordfish or marlin? Why does a plump, juicy, expensive fillet of bigeye tuna seem intuitively more healthy than a Filet O' Fish, when only the former contains hazardous levels of heavy metals?
While living in poverty, I knew that more expensive meat was better tasting, and better for me. The pink-slime level of meat products I could sometimes afford caused unpleasant GI symptoms which unprocessed meat didn't. I learned to avoid the cheap meat products and experienced intermittent anemia instead. Even the raw ingredients of pink slime, like tendons and cartilage, cost an order of magnitude more than pink slime products, so I went without.
Lack of access to a minimally adequate variety of affordable nutrition is a class problem.
It's connective tissue, with a bit of lean beef mixed in. This has a different nutritional profile. There is less iron, and the amino acid proportions are different.
We could call it "pureed tendons, ligaments, defatted fat tissue, cartilage, lean beef, and ammonia or citric acid". That is a long and unwieldy name. The common name, known to consumers, is pink slime.
So rather than give it a name which is deliberately off-putting it's probably better to give it something vaguely neutral and otherwise let it stand on its own merits, whatever they may be.
The name "pink slime" isn't from ABC. It's from an FDA employee who got to examine the stuff.
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.
It was used for other products, like ground beef.
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.
In any event, according to web sleuthing typical chicken patties/nuggets are not made from mechanically separated chicken, which instead mostly goes into bologna, hot dogs, and the like.
What makes it not OK?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_separated_meat
This puree includes bone, bone marrow, skin, nerves, blood vessels, and the scraps of meat remaining on the bones. The resulting product is a blend primarily consisting of tissues not generally considered meat along with a much smaller amount of actual meat (muscle tissue).
Of course the final product depends on how it’s processed. A lot of the time the stuff is centrifuged to remove fat, in which case it’s used as filler. If you’ve ever eaten a cheap chicken nugget and tasted something off, that’s what it is. So nutrition aside it’s disgusting, and is generally only found in heavily processed foods with a ton of salt and sugar in them; nothing less will make it palatable.
You’re never going to find the stuff in any food that isn’t terrible for you. If you have concerns about prion diseases like BSE then it’s also a concern, since the processing is unlikely to destroy prions.
It’s the same product, it’s just processed more, but it’s taken off the carcass the same way, and you still get to enjoy that lovely spinal cord. Colloquially the full fat product is “white slime” and the centrifuged and ammoniated product is “pink slime”.
On the contrary, "pink slime", or lean finely textured beef, is made from the scraps and leftovers of (non-mechanically separated) beef, and is put into ground beef for humans.
That exact link you posted states:
> USDA regulations for procurement of frozen fresh ground beef products state that "Beef that is mechanically separated from bone with automatic deboning systems, advanced lean (meat) recovery (AMR) systems or powered knives, will not be allowed".
Mechanically separated meat is NOT the same thing as "pink slime", and the specific reasons that MSM is not allowed for humans (danger of mad cow disease) does not apply to "pink slime".
BPI uses AMR to recover the scraps. You can now call it ground beef. That's what we're all talking about it. That's what the article is about.
FTA:
>As cattle carcasses are turned into steaks at a processing plant, knife-wielding workers cut fatty edges off the meat. These carcass cuttings, or “trim”—about 1/3 of each animal’s weight —contain small portions of edible meat, which can be used to make ground beef.
No, that's not what we're all talking about. From the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_meat_recovery article that you posted:
> Although some sources claim AMR systems use ammonia (or anhydrous ammonia, ammonia hydroxide, etc.) to treat the meat, this appears to be due to confusion between AMR and the production of lean finely textured beef (LFTB, commonly referred to as pink slime).[citation needed] LFTB is in fact treated with ammonia,[4] and so is substantially more restricted than most AMR products.
Furthermore, all AMR-processed product from cattle more than 30 months old now is prohibited from being used for food, and such product from younger cattle and from other livestock species also is prohibited if it contains CNS material.
Is there something inherently wrong with eating any of this stuff?
People eat heart, liver, kidney. I can’t see how bone and skin, or blood vessels could be bad for you.
But I wouldn't know exactly where these nerve fibres are located and if they're completely removed from regular cuts of meat.
Another question is: do the prions accumulate and remain in the main body (soma) of the nerve cell, or do the prions diffuse throughout the axons and dendrites of the nerve cells.
If prions remain within the soma, then removing nerve ganglia from products intended for human consumption or animal feed would, one supposes, limit the spread of prions.
I should be able to shop at a normal grocery store and know what I'm purchasing, regardless of wealth or education level.
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.
Concerns were raised again when the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic, commonly known as "mad cow disease", occurred in the United Kingdom in 1986. Since bits of the spinal cord (the part most likely to be carrying the BSE prion)[4][5] often got mixed in with the rest of the meat, products using mechanically separated meat taken from the carcasses of bovines were at higher risk for transmitting BSE to humans.
Given how resilient prions are I’d be pretty damned wary of eating purées of nerve tissue.
So I'm guessing that means the "pink slime" this article is talking about is something else?
The article says that pink slime is instead made from beef trimmings, which does not involve that grinding process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_meat_recovery
> The meat produced in this manner can contain no more than 150(±30) milligrams of calcium per 200 grams product, as calcium in such high concentrations in the product would be indicative of bone being mixed with the meat. Products that exceed the calcium content limit must instead be labeled "mechanically separated beef or pork" in the ingredients statement.
Mechanically separated meat is not allowed for human consumption specifically because of the danger of potential-prion-containing nerve tissue entering the product. Importantly, these prions are extremely difficult to deactivate, and thus it wouldn't make sense to allow this to be served to humans, no matter what further processing happened.
Here is a link from snopes that clarifies the difference: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/legal-separation/
> A meat product known as “boneless lean beef trimmings” (BLBT) or “lean finely textured beef,” pejoratively referred to as “pink slime,” is often confused with mechanically separated meat, although it is produced by a different process. In order to extract pricer lean beef from less valuable, fattier trimmings, centrifuges are used to separate the fat out of the meat trimmings, and the resulting lean beef is then squeezed through small tubes, where it is exposed to a small amount of ammonia gas, producing a pinkish substance. Unlike MSM, lean beef trimmings are legal for sale in the U.S., although they are mixed in with other meat products (usually ground beef) and generally do not comprise more than 25 percent of the final meat products purchased by end consumers.
http://www.beefusa.org/CMDocs/BeefUSA/Resources/AMI%20Fact%2...
Woah... that seems like a huge deal to me
Also, Salmonella has a tendency to grow in ground production areas and is a concern as well. The fact of the matter is, ammonia disinfection is a tool to combat these threats, and is useful even in instances where proper food handling practices are observed. After all, if ground beef is prepared correctly by the consumer (i.e. cooked to 160F, not cross-contaminated), then it's a moot point anyway. But we still do all of this as a precaution to protect people. And because it's the law.
Do you have any solid data or can you cite any analysis of per-capita STEC infections, categorized by infection vector, for the US and EU?
Also, steak tartare is made of steak, not trim. I'm not convinced that it makes for a valid comparison.
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.
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5a8ff76960d03e7f57eac3...
I can see why they want the 'low pressure' stuff to be differentiated, but it still needs to be indentified in some way on the ingredients list.
In the UK, I don't think we have the equivalent of this pink slime, or at least I've never heard of it.
Ground beef in the UK is generally labelled as "beef mince" or "steak mince", where "steak mince" is minced beef produced by mincing whole cuts (such as flank), and "beef mince" can also contain minced trimmings, and generally has a higher fat content.
I have no problem buying either of these. Indeed, sometimes you want a higher fat content, such as when making burgers.
Thr pink slime in the article seems to be something inbetween MRM and trimmings, and I would have a problem with buying it.
In the human body, ammonia is a lot like alcohol and carbon dioxide: it is a poison that we are well-equipped to remove.
Well, sort of. Just as people with lung trouble have problems removing carbon dioxide, people with kidney trouble have problems removing ammonia. What about people with kidney trouble? Perhaps they deserve a warning label.
So no, please, let's not start slapping ammonia warnings on all of our food.
So someone can upsell you on ground beef "With No Pink Slime"!