Read the New York Times story here.
To make a long story short: Beef Products buys the cheapest, least desirable beef on offer—fatty sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor, which are notoriously rife with pathogens like E. coli 0157 and antibiotic-resistant salmonella. It sends the scraps through a series of machines, grinds them into a paste, separates out the fat, and laces the substance with ammonia to kill pathogens.
The result, known by some in the industry as “PINK SLIME,” is marketed widely to hamburger makers. The product has three selling points: 1) it’s cheap; 2) unlike conventional ground beef, which routinely carries E. coli, etc, PINK SLIME is sterilized by the addition of AMMONIA; and 3) it’s so full of AMMONIA that it will kill pathogens in the ground beef it’s mixed with.
In short, Beef Products’ is peddling a solution—and a cheap one at that—to the beef industry’s embarrassing food-borne-illness problem. No wonder that burger purveyors from agribusiness giant Cargill to McDonald’s, from Burger King to your kid’s public-school cafeteria, snap up 60 pound blocks of pink slime and mix it into conventional ground beef at doses of up to 15 percent.
But as the Times story shows, the ammonia doesn’t always kill the pathogens in pink slime. Indeed, far from sterilizing a batch of burger mix, pink slime can actually add to the pathogen cocktail. And what's more, school lunch officials said that in some years Beef Products testing results were worse than many of the program’s two dozen other suppliers, which use traditional meat processing methods. From 2005 to 2009, Beef Products had a rate of 36 positive results for salmonella per 1,000 tests, compared to a rate of nine positive results per 1,000 tests for the other suppliers, according to statistics from the program.
Thus, of pink slime’s three chief selling points, only one holds up to scrutiny: it’s cheap.
Note that the information unearthed in this important Times is new only to the public; the fast-food industry, the USDA, and the school-lunch program have long known about pink slime’s less than stellar food-safety performance. Indeed, pressure from buyers may have contributed to the pathogen load—as The Times reports, complaints about an overpowering ammonia aroma forced the company to ramp down the dose of the sterilizing agent, which may have upped its susceptibility salmonella, etc.
The National School Lunch Program, which forces cafeteria administrators to feed students lunch for $2.68 per student per day, is a microcosm of our cheap food system. Two-thirds of that outlay goes to overhead and labor, leaving much less than a buck to spend on ingredients. No wonder the lunch program is such a massive buyer of pink slime—3.5 million pounds last year alone, the Times reports.
School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef…. In 2004, lunch officials increased the amount of Beef Products meat allowed in its hamburgers to 15 percent, from 10 percent, to increase savings.
Three cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef. Under the severe fiscal austerity that school cafeteria administrators operate under, pinching those three pennies is a rational decision, even if it means subjecting children ammonia-ridden slime that may contain pathogens.
For its part, the fast-food industry has reacted to the Times revelations, not by renouncing the use of pink slime but rather defending it. According to Associated Press, “Fast-food chains McDonald’s Corp. and Burger King Holdings Inc. and agricultural conglomerate Cargill Inc. all use the [Beef Products] meat in their hamburgers. All said they will keep using the meat and that their products are safe.
The USDA says it doesn't see a problem with PINK SLIME or AMMONIA in meat.
Did you hear much about this in local news? No, of course not. That astute institution of journalism, The Denver Post, only reported the fast food chains and Cargill's denial of wrong doing, barely acknowledging the NYT story. Read the Denver Post story here.
There is a larger point here, too, and that is the value of knowing where your food comes from. My suggestion...stay away from fast food ground beef. If you buy ground beef, get it from Vitamin Cottage, Sunflower Market or Whole Foods. I'd recommend that you write to your Congressman/woman or President Obama, but I doubt it will make a difference. Government and Big Business aren't interested in your petty concerns about eating safe food.
No comments:
Post a Comment