Where's the beef? The Pink Slime story

What is Pink Slime?

It's meat scraps turned into meat filler – and it ends up in burgers and tacos everywhere.

 

This product is actually called ammoniated boneless lean beef trimmings. Still not sure? This is 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. Once swept up, the scraps are sent through a series of machines, which grinds them into a paste, separates out the fat, and laces the substance with ammonia to kill pathogens.

The USDA allows this ammonia treated meat to enter the marketplace and with no labeling requirement on the packaging to inform the consumer that the meat they are about to buy contains ammonia. It is used to stretch the actual ground beef, and the USDA shockingly allows up to 15 percent of a ground beef product to be this filler and still be labeled ground beef….

According to a New York Times article, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."

(…)

McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone. And since the USDA considers it a "process", Ammonia doesn't have to be listed on the packaging as a separate ingredient!

~ Judy Molland, Yummy! Some Pink Slime In That Burger?

 

Of course you can avoid Pink Slime by not eating red meat. If you choose to eat red meat, buy grass-fed beef, which contains no ammonia. Our best advice when choosing animal-derived foods is to buy directly from the source – get to know a farmer (you can find them at farmer's markets) and visit the farm. Meet the butcher and see the processing facility. Be honest with yourself about where your food comes from.