The story of pink slime is a revealing window on how our food system today works—and a fitting topic for a meatless Monday post.
This picture was taken from an ABC news special on “pink slime”—if you haven’t heard about it before, you can get a taste for the media frenzy regarding it here, here, and here.
But what is pink slime? The industry term is lean fine textured beef (LFTB) or boneless lean beef trimmings. Finely ground beef scraps and connective tissue removed from fat are “recovered” from the meat processing and then heated and treated with ammonia gas or citric acid to kill bacteria. It’s then compressed into blocks and flash frozen for use as filler in beef products and shipped to grocery stores in frozen blocks to add to ground beef. It’s also very common in school lunch meat: it’s generally found in less expensive ground beef patties, which the USDA often buys for school lunch programs.
LFTB was invented by Beef Products Inc (BPI) in the wake of health concerns in the 90s, and can constitute up to 15% of ground beef without having to be labeled.[1] It was approved for human consumption in 2001, despite numerous USDA scientists (such as Gerald Zirnstein, the USDA microbiologist who coined the term “pink slime” in 2002) who argued that it wasn’t meat. However, the then-under secretary of agriculture who approved it allegedly stated “it’s pink, therefore it’s meat.”[2] That undersecretary, Joann Smith, then went to sit on BPI’s principal major board of directors, where she made more than $1.2m over 17 years.
The parts of the cow typically used to make pink slime can include (but are not limited to) the areas of the flank near the hide, which is often exposed to fecal matter. This fact was used in a series of ABC news reports this past March that’s drawn attention to the issue. However, no foodborne illnesses are have been connected to consumption of LFTB—it’s gross, but it’s not dangerous.
Marion Nestle has argued that pink slime allows for more of the cow to be used in processing—she explains in the Atlantic that only about 50% of the cow’s weight is fit for human consumption, meaning that the other half of the cow is destined for landfills, fertilizers, and pet food (makes you wonder what’s in that dog food, right?)—as it “rescues” 12 to 15 lbs of meat that would otherwise be unfit for human consumption.[3]
Moreover, the ammonia in the LFTB kills E. coli that might be in the rest of the ground beef- ostensibly making that hamburger safer. The beef trimmings that used to go into ground beef before pink slime was created in the 90s was much more likely to contain harmful bacteria—so isn’t LFTB making our hamburgers safer?
The beef industry claims that if LFTB were to become illegal, 1.5 million more cows would have to be slaughtered in order to meet current demand. This, in turn, would lead to more carbon dioxide released from all of those new cows being born—the equivalent of 1.2 million new cars on the road. However, that’s assuming that US beef consumption remains at current levels—when in fact it’s been on the decline for the past 20 years.[4] Those numbers also come from the beef industry, so they should be taken with a grain of salt.
It ultimately comes down to a choice—do we ban LFTB from our beef because we’d rather not have ammonia in our food? Do we label its presence so that consumers know what they’re ingesting? Do we do nothing, acknowledging that, as chemical-filled and unsavory as it is, LFTB doesn’t seem to pose any health risks? Does the fact that the under-secretary of agriculture who supported it went on to sit on BPI’s board of directors call into question her credibility as an impartial civil servant?
Whichever way things turn out, “pink slime” should give us pause— we need to take a good, hard look at our food system and the things that go into our meals.
