‘Pink Slime’ Furor Means Disaster for U.S. Meat Innovator

Look, it's a lot simpler than that. It had nothing to do with the idea of mechanically separated meat (wait until they learn about McNuggets!)

A lot of parents quickly got exposed to the concept of beef being treated with ammonia. All the science reports in the world can prove it's effective and safe, but you can't erase that mental image in their heads that (food + poison) = bad. The mindset of a parent is just different from that of a food processing executive.

Please.

This article reeks of PR — even using much of the same language that BPI does on its own website, pinkslimeisamyth.com / beefisbeef.com. For example, “puffs of ammonia hydroxide.” Puffs? Does that sound like a very technical or descriptive term an actual journalist would independently come up with?

Have you ever trimmed a large cut of meat at home? There are always pieces of meat stuck in the fat that you can't easily get to. They warm up the trimmings then spin them to separate the meat from the fat.

That doesn't sound like pink slime or filler to me. It sounds like little pieces of meat that would otherwise be thrown away and wasted.

I started buying eggs only from natural farms the day I started working for an egg "industrial plant". I suppose if people get to see how chicken live enclosed cage barely bigger than the animals they will think it twice about buying them.

In America you have Genetically modified food that you don't know is GM, and all kind of antibiotics and steroids on meat. So it seems that "out of sight, out of mind works"

For example, about halfway through this article there's mention of a prize-winning New York Times article that popularized the phrase "pink slime". I'd like to read the article, so I clicked on the link... and got a stock ticker quote for [NYT]. I get that Bloomberg is in the financial news business, but come on! There's no footnote with the actual link and not even a title for me to search with. It's just bizarre.

Now I don't fault the guy for coming up with a method to separate meat from fat mechanically (itself not an act of villiany), but the end result is what it is...and calling it "lean finely textured beef" stretches well into absurdity, especially when you add the lack of clarity as to what an "ammonia puff" entails and its real impacts, the fallout once its in the public eye should not be surprising.

The standout point for me, from the Bloomberg article was that ammonia occurs naturally in beef. I don't know how much more appetizing it makes it, but it starts to sound a lot different than a ammonia of the household-cleaner variety.

What I don't understand is why, with all of the food-science being done on mass produced meat to make it smell like this, and feel like that, we even need to bother using animals in the first place. This recent piece by Mark Bittman on a new and improved fake-meat is pretty interesting in that regard: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/finally-fak...

The people here who talk about killing your own meat, and how people know that an animal died to get to their plate, and so on, I think, are perpetuating a false equivalence. The common perception, crafted by the food industry, is a cow on a placid farm that lives to a nice old age. A lot of money goes towards alleviating the image of thousands of sick, smelly cattle cramped into prison cells. (Full disclosure: I've become more and more of a vegetarian over time.)

So, besides moral issues related to suffering and health issues like increased resistance to antibiotics due to improper handling of waste at farms, there's also the issue of how much petroleum it takes to produce a calorie of beef (3 to 1 calories, or something similar if I remember correctly). And how toxic some of these farms are to the water supply. And how cow-released methane may be one of the main contributors to global warming. And so on.

But, I'm not really posting here to posit what some may consider to be fringe views regarding our food supply. What I found interesting about the article, and I'm guessing why it was posted here in the first place is that the Roth was a hacker. He came up with a brilliant solution to a problem. And, it would appear from the article that his technology is now under-fire because it makes for an easy target. Ammonia is the stuff you clean your counter with; you're not supposed to spray it on your hamburger.

I'm not a fan of ends-justify-the-means tactics, an after reading the article I do get the sense that people who would like to see reform in the food industry are using this as a way of raising public outcry. Shining a light on where our food comes from is good. But, unfortunately the outcome of this story will likely mean that an innovator is the loser and the industry at large will carry on just fine.

What would be great is to see Roth, or someone else with a hacker mentality set about transforming the industry into something more sustainable and less reliant on the farming of animals. The Bittman piece linked to above shows that it's possible for us to begin replacing at least some of our meat into non-animal varieties. Transforming a really old-school industry full of entrenched interests and out-dated – prehistoric – means of production should appeal to someone here, right?

Anyway, sorry for the long post – the subject is fascinating to me.

Um, no. A hamburger is ground beef underbelly or chuck. You can add lots of stuff - pink slime, soy protein, corn syrup, dried onion powder, MSG - but that stuff isn't hamburger, it's just what you've added.

I spent two years looking to find ways to innovate away from factory farming, and every solution seems to revolve around major market forces and changing consumer habits.

Disruption in this market looks to be, bottom up, coming from cottage/micro producers, and thus, slow. If someone can efficiently disrupt distribution away from grocery chains you'll see a major change in food consumption, in the success of more small, high quality producers. Look at high end wine as an indicator.

As a restaurateur/chef for many years this is a passion, but I can't see it getting fixed anytime soon, even with the gastro-activism we're starting to see now.

Any of you smart app builders looking to disrupt something mind crushingly difficult, look at food.

Indeed, I remember Jamie Oliver's TV show in the US where he actually poured ammonia over meat that had been through a washing machine - yet suddenly the idea gains traction now? Interesting..

However, stuff like this could really impact future advances in food production (which the world needs). I still don't get what's the BFD about avoiding GM products - I think it's one of the best things to happen to humanity (how many people didn't die from starvation and how inexpensive is food today - all because of GM crops).

Cloned meat receives the same treatment, when in reality it could be the next best thing for both people and nature...