Posted on 05/07/2012 8:55:11 PM PDT by quantim
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- Beef Products Inc. will close processing plants in three states this month because of the controversy surrounding its meat product that critics have dubbed "pink slime," a company official said Monday.
About 650 jobs will be lost when the plants close on May 25 in Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kansas; and Waterloo Iowa, company spokesman Rich Jochum said. A plant in South Sioux City, Neb., will remain open but run at reduced capacity.
The South Dakota-based company blamed the closures on what it said were unfounded attacks over its lean, finely textured beef. During its processing, bits of beef are heated and treated with a small amount of ammonia to kill bacteria. The filler has been used for years and meets federal food safety standards.
But the company suspended operations at the three plants in March amid public uproar over the filler. BPI has declined to discuss financial details, but has said it took a "substantial" hit after social media exploded with worry over the product and an online petition seeking its ouster from schools drew hundreds of thousands of supporters.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided that school districts may stop using it, and some retail chains have pulled products containing it from their shelves.
Company officials had hoped to recover but have since realized that doing so wasn't possible in the near future, Jochum said Monday. The company paid its workers during the suspension.
"We will continue communicating the benefits of BPI's lean beef, but that process is much more difficult than (countering) the campaign to spread misinformation that brought us to this point," Jochum said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
It is claimed the nutrition is roughly the same as 90/10 beef. I haven’t tried it, but it sounds like it would be better than a burger from 93/7 (which are decent, if not as tasty as say 75/25).
If it was cheaper than 93/7, and available, I would definitely try it, however, it appears BPI built their business on USDA school contracts, and recently, pet foods. I think the BPI disaster is more a lesson of why you shouldn’t hitch your wagon to the government in any shape or form, unless it’s the defense industry and you have very good lawyers.
I would suspect that any left over ammonia cooks off if you go for well done (I do on my burgers, unless I make them from packaged ground beef).
They are incrementally working on food now. I'm all for a safe food supply, but my biggest concern is the crap they allow in from China.
Speaking of which, I thought I read a few years back that a law was coming where the products country of origin had to be labeled. That's not always the case. Some products say "Distributed by so and so in Whatevertown, NJ" but you still don't know where the ingredients in it were made/produced.
Todd Schnitt actually had the smoking gun on this, but nobody carried it.
He looked around for the most educated person he could find on consumer beef and found a Phd that was the “go to” guy for the industry, and interviewed him on his show. In the midst of the interview the man revealed ABC had interviewed him on “pink slime”, but when he wasn’t giving the answers the reporter wanted, ABC hung up on him.
This is the post I made last month: “They were trying to get to the bottom of the “pink slime” business and they asked for the name of the best expert in the meat industry they could find. They got in touch with this guy on the phone (David Theno), and he said the reporter who was covering it for ABC had also called him, and was asking him about the product for the ABC news story.”
“Halfway through the interview, the ABC reporter Jim Avila hung up on the expert. The expert called him back, and the Avila told him, the expert wasn’t saying what he wanted for his story, and he the expert was just a tool of the food industry. And hung up on him AGAIN.”
“So Schnitt’s show called Avila, and he hung up on them. I heard later Avila denied it, but when I heard Theno talking about it, I believed him - he seemed unrehearsed and astounded about it. It’s an incredible story, and totally uncovered in the media. I’ve been able to find very little about it, except for a few tweets.”
And now this vile reporter, Avila, has destroyed an industry, and caused over 600 people to lose their jobs, AND (according to Theno) destroyed the use of a food product that actually INCREASED food safety. May he burn in the hell he has visited on many innocent people.
I know what you mean...its like the tuna, it just hasnt tasted as good since it became dolphin safe...
My mother worked in commercial insurance for many years. She said that even accidental ammonia exposure was always excluded on liability policies.
This was the beef industry’s answer to mechanically separated chicken, which nobody is in an uproar over. Random screaming liberal politics killed this one. It was being used as part of retail hamburger mixes as well, and nobody had been complaining about anything but the subjective yuck factor — it didn’t have any more objective danger than hamburger meat in general.
In high enough concentrations it can kill, fast.
Yet probably 1/2 the people here on FR believe the BS. Kind of lets you know the effect MSM still has, even on those who should know better.
Interesting wording. If they "may" stop using it now, does that imply that schools were required to use it before?
Sell it in the free market if you think you can, but you better put in on the label of anything you are trying to pass off as pure ground beef to let the customer decide whether they want it. And don't try to use a tricky name for it like "health" food bars listing "evaporated cane juice" to avoid putting sugar as the first item in the ingredients.
As for me, I think I'll figure out how the meat grinder attachment on my mixer works so I can make my own hamburgers. I used to have a craving for McDonald's Chickenish McNuggets until I saw the ammonia dissolved meat fluid that went into them. Ditto for supermarket hamburger since this story hit.
Unfounded my ass. Picked up some non-pink slime filler from Costco and the difference was night and day both in the way it cooks and tastes. The non-pink slime hamburger is measurably better than the pink slime crap burgers.
I like those bits of organ meat you find between the ribs of fried chicken. What are they? Kidney? They are just so good! I also love the bits of blood that cooks as it oozes from roasting meat. Often when I’m roasting a pig and I get hungry, I’ll break off a chunk of ear because that is the first part to be done. Mmmmmm. Then of course there’s that puss like filling you find in a steamed clam — it’s all the guts and goo. It’s the best part. Anyone like sardines? Sometimes the intestines kinda string out if you eat them in nibbles. I saw bulk chicken hearts at the Korean market for 90 cents a pound! I think I’m going to make something with a couple pounds of those!
BTW: that pink “soft serve” stuff is mechanically separated chicken. There is no such thing as mechanically separated beef in the US because it was entirely outlawed after the spongiform encephalitis (mad cow) scare. I think the beef product at issue is made from trimmings cut from steaks and such.
“PepsiCo has come under fire from pro-life advocates because it has been contracting with a research firm that uses fetal cells from babies victimized by abortions to test and produce artificial flavor enhancers.”
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Another item brought to my attention by my easily-fooled Facebooking kids. (”Pepsi has fetus tissue in it”)
Although I was proud of them for seeing through the Kony2012 crap.
I’m thinking of opening an account so I can post stories about the evils of too much hairspray (black widow spider nests in your hair), and really need to post the warning about the creep with a hook for a hand that is bothering kids up on Lover’s Lane.
Remember Good Ole Cas? LOL. A local highly controversial politician/grocer in our area up till about the early to mid 1970’s or so. Rumor has circulated for decades that embalming fluid was put in the beef. You sure didn’t ever want to buy chicken from him. It looked good but as soon as it was put in the skillet the stench would run you out of the house. If you weren’t in the area then ask your neighbors :>}
Ammonia is a natural component of meat, and of all other food products. Being an essential component of all protein and DNA, it's also present in your body.
In the ground meat, ammonia is added to bring the pH to a level that is inhospitable for bacterial growth. It's not like poison is being added...for laboratory use, I used to grow yeast in a solution of ammonium salts, and they loved it.
Stupid.
That guy who first called this “pink slime” needs to be sued for defamation.
-—That guy who first called this “pink slime” needs to be sued for defamation.——
Chalk up another victory for the enemedia.
BPI’s product is not pink and it is not slime. The photo you posted shows packing styrofoam being poured into a box prior to fitting.
Congrats on succumbing to an internet hoax. BPI has it worse off. Oh, and I also have to pay more for ground beef.
You got suckered.
That is a picture of Mechanically Separated Chicken
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/pink-slime-photo-isnt-what-it-appears-to-be/2012/03/09/gIQApJJd1R_blog.html
‘Pink Slime’ in hamburgers actually made it safer - get ready for more ground beef related illnesses.
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