Posted on 03/27/2012 6:52:52 AM PDT by EBH
Craig Letch, director of food quality and assurance for Beef Products Inc., declined to discuss financial details but said business has taken a "substantial" hit since social media exploded with worry over the ammonia-treated filler and an online petition seeking its ouster from schools drew hundreds of thousands of supporters. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided school districts may stop using it, and some retail chains have pulled products containing it from their shelves.
"...We feel like when people can start to understand the truth and reality then our business will come back," he said. "It's 100 percent beef."
The lower-cost ingredient is made from fatty bits of meat left over from other cuts. The bits are heated and spun to remove most of the fat. The lean mix then is compressed into blocks for use in ground meat. The product is exposed to ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria, such as E. coli and salmonella.
The result is a product that is as much as 97 percent lean beef, Letch said.
"At a time when so many Americans struggle to put a healthy, nutritious meal on their family's dinner table, the unfounded mischaracterization of Lean Finely Textured Beef as 'pink slime' is unconscionable," Barry Carpenter, chief executive officer of the National Meat Association, said in a Monday statement. ...
...Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has campaigned against the filler's use, praised "people power" for getting it removed from so many products.
"I hope the U.S. government is also listening because it's partly responsible for lying to the public for allowing this cheap, low-quality meat filler to be used for so long without having to legally state its presence on packaging," Oliver said in an email statement provided to The Associated Press.
(Excerpt) Read more at rr.com ...
Pink slime, and their quality control is by Letch? Is their CEO named “Roddy Killian Carrion”, by chance?
After hearing about the pink slime I bought a meat grinder.
I won’t buy hamburger meat again.
Green Slime [1968] => Pink Slime [2012]
Where you don't eat the pink slime, it eats you!
“After hearing about the pink slime I bought a meat grinder.
I wont buy hamburger meat again.”
Not a bad way to go at all. Nothing beats fresh ground beef from fresh cuts of beef.
Our local Safeways will custom grind beef from meat you buy in their store. We wait until chuck goes on sale and have them grind it for us. Talking with store employees that work in the meat department, they do the exact same thing themselves.
Meat ground this way can be cooked ultra rare, say for grilled burgers, without fear of e coli because germs grow on the outside of fresh meat, not the inside. The problem with ground beef of course is that when it is ground, the surface germs get mixed up quite nicely throughout the whole ground beef product where they incubate if the ground meat isn’t properly handled.
Fast food restaurants “solve” the problem by cooking their hamburger patties into little disk-shaped pieces of coal, removing all flavor, all juiciness, and a great deal of the nutrition.
With fresh, custom ground meat, one can make truly yummy and nutritious burgers at home.
I generally avoided McDonald's hamburgers. If I wanted fast food Wendy's and Burger King were always better. However there was just something in the McNuggets that made me crave them. Then a few months ago I saw the stories about the chicken flavored pink slime and lost the craving.
Basically both take the bones from which other cuts of meat have been removed and then strip them chemically and mechanically. I think I'll pass. Even at best it would be like taking the scraps of carrots, mincing and bleaching them to the consistency of baby food and then trying to sell that as carrots. I'll stick to the real food.
low-cost ground beef isn’t harmless, it’s repulsive.
...and turn that pink slime into... "pink lemonade"!
Not a bad option. I an lucky enough to have a local butcher that makes their own and I know what goes in it.
Actually McDonalds no longer uses pink slime...
Now go have a hamburger! It is better than the one’s they serve your kids in school.
Repulsive and harmless are not mutually exclusive traits. The Pontiac Aztec was repulsive, but was relatively harmless as cars go.
noted.
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