Pink Slime in Ground Beef Bad
Op-Ed Contributor
Go Ahead. Eat Pink Slime.
Of all the gross-out stories about food that have broken the Internet in recent years — maggots in mushrooms, "wood chips" in shredded cheese, bug bits in chocolate bars — nothing has captured the public imagination more than "pink slime."
Before 2012, the makeup of ground beef was a bit of a don't-ask, don't-tell situation. But that year, ABC News ran a series of stories on lean, finely textured beef — the industry term for pink slime — and the process by which a South Dakota plant called Beef Products Inc. added it to ground beef to lower its fat content. This week, ABC is being taken to trial in a multibillion dollar lawsuit by the plant arguing that the story was defamatory.
The story certainly crushed sales. Beef Products Inc. says that it not only lost $1.9 billion in the wake of the news coverage, but that it was forced to close three of its four plants and had to lay off some 700 workers.
I'll leave it to the jury to determine whether or not the ABC story was fake news. But the truth about pink slime is that, despite its unappetizing name, it's entirely safe to eat. More than that, it is an affordable source of lean meat for low-income Americans, and stigmatizing it hurts people who rely on it for protein.
What seemed to scare consumers the most about pink slime — which ABC claimed was used in 70 percent of ground beef sold in American supermarkets — was that the lean beef trimmings were treated with ammonia. That sounds scary, but is actually perfectly safe. Ammonia is used to kill harmful bacteria that exists in the meat, but is present in such tiny quantities that it is not harmful to consume. The United States Department of Agriculture affirmed as much in a letter back in 2012, a few weeks after the ABC story aired. Indeed, Chips Ahoy cookies and Velveeta cheese contain similar ammonium compounds, like ammonium phosphate, as does Wonder Bread.
Understandably, though, people are scared of the word ammonia, which they associate with heavy-duty cleaning products. Perhaps unsuprisingly that's why some quarter of a million people signed a petition asking that the government not serve their children ammonia-treated beef for lunch and why several fast-food chains, including McDonalds and Burger King, renounced the product and stopped using it in their burgers.
Consumers are right to be bothered that there is little information about how much of the beef in this country is produced, and there is nothing wrong with demanding greater transparency in the supply chain. ABC is making the case that that's exactly what their series did. "We believe in the principle that people deserve to know what's in the food they eat and are confident that when all the facts are presented in court, ABC's reporting will be fully vindicated," said attorney Kevin Baine.
But the truth is that there is little transparency in so many of our food products. Ground chuck — the all-American backyard cookout staple that most discerning shoppers would choose over something they knew contained pink slime — is not, in fact, made from ground chuck steak, but from chuck trimmings. Meats like sausages and "pure" ground beef, are treated with a slew of other chemicals that could be even worse than ammonia, like carbon monoxide, which is used to keep beef a nice pinkish red on the shelves.
Which is why it's unfair to everyone, especially low-income shoppers, to suggest that there is something other than beef — and therefore something pernicious — in their food. The ability to buy lean, ground meat at an affordable price is especially important in poorer communities that tend to suffer from higher rates of obesity and heart disease — two maladies that can be addressed in part by eating leaner proteins.
To suggest that there's industrial strength cleaner in our meat or that pink slime isn't meat would be, well, fake news.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/opinion/go-ahead-eat-pink-slime.html
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