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 ...
Tough.
If this stuff was so good it could be sold as a stand alone product.
I want to be supportive. But..Yuck! Am I supposed to feed this to my child??
This whole pink slime stuff was started by Moochelle’s buddy Jaime Oliver wasn’t it?
And now the federal government/schools will be their biggest customer. hhmmmm
Recently, my local independent grocer had a sale on bottom round. It cost the same as hamburger so I bought several. the problem with them is that they were cut way too small, and were way too lean. So, I bought a little beef fat on the side. I took it home, cut it up and dropped it into the auger of my electric meat grinder. Viola, hamburger that tasted good, and NO ammonia in my meat, and was as lean as I desired to make it.
I would rather have had my own cow butchered, but still...no pink slime.
“Pink Slime.”
Sounds delightful right? Maybe if you’re talking about Nickelodeon’s slime park.
Pink slime, also known as lean finely textured beef or lean beef trimmings, is a product that was previously only used for pet food.
In 2001, however, the product became approved by the United States Department of Agriculture for use as an additive in various beef food products.
As of now, food can be composed of up to 15 per cent lean beef trimmings before companies are required to show it on the ingredient label.
http://www.ngcsuthesaint.com/2012/04/chow-has-no-pink-slime/
No, the concern was always there.
I'd grill it.
We’re omnivores. Protein is protein. And free markets work...
Then what is the stuff in the photo I posted? And why was it only allowed in pet food until recently?
I don't get it, seems like making mountains of of molehills
It is the product of government regulation, pure and simple.
According to this wiki...
“Pink slime, also known as lean finely textured beef (LFTB) [2] and boneless lean beef trimmings (BLBT)[3], is a beef-based food additive that may be added to ground beef and beef-based processed meats as an inexpensive filler.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime
Is the pic you posted of pink slime, that looks red, a beef-based food additive? It looks a lot like hamburger to me!
I’ve seen the pink, ice cream looking ooze (same pic as above) being reported to be McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets too. Personally, I think this is a lot of hysteria created by veggie Nazis on the left that want to turn people off any kind of meat.
Several of my friends grind their own too. It is noticeably better than the store bought stuff.
The whole “Dude, it’s beef” campaign flopped. The public still doesn’t want this stuff. I don’t care if “pink slime”, aka “finely textured beef”, is sold, I just want to know if it is added to the ground beef I buy. “Pink slime” is a filler and ground beef that includes it should be labeled so the consumer it at least aware of it. I consider this stuff particularly unappetizing and I prefer to avoid it. If it is as wonderful as BPI and others say, they can simply sell it as a stand alone product. I am sure they’ve always known if the public realized how it was produced they would avoid it.
I don’t normally do people’s research for them, but I dropped the image into images.google.com.
Mechanically separated chicken would be what your image is.
I believe that photo is actually of mechanically separated chicken.
I understand that the process is similar to how they produce “pink slime”. The end result is a slurry.
I believe mechanically separated chicken may actually be sold as a stand alone product in the form of Chicken Nugget type foods. I could be wrong about that though.
The “pink slime”, aka “finely textured beef” is a beef filler which is added to ground beef. I think it is actually too lean, among other reasons, to be sold as a stand alone product.
To answer your second question, I would guess that the concern was probably had more to do with how sensitive dogs and cats liver are to any foreign chemical.
For example many human food products use PG, propylene glycol, as a food additive. Totally safe for humans, totally safe for dogs (at certain limits), can cause death in cats.
We humans are pretty hearty in the liver department, probably because we are intelligent and probably tasted everything under the sun, meaning our genetics have been refined to have wide-spectrum livers.
Also, we can do shots of Jack Daniels all weekend long, and still not turn yellow if we layoff of it during the week.
Shoot I grew up eating bologna, vienna sausages, hot dogs, spam and still eat the stuff on occasion. Oh well, I ain’t dead yet.
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