The "Pink Slime" in Your Kid's School Lunch
Like a horror-film villain, "pink slime"—the cheeky nickname for scraps of slaughtered cow that have been pulverized, defatted, subjected to ammonia steam to kill pathogens, and congealed into a filler for ground beef—takes a pounding but keeps coming back.
Last month, McDonald's announced it would stop using the stuff. But just this week, pink slime got a de facto endorsement from none other than the USDA, which—the online journal The Daily reported—plans to keep buying millions of pounds of it for use in the National School Lunch Program.
These developments are just the latest installments of a long-playing drama. The product first entered my consciousness in the 2008 documentary Food, Inc., when the product's maker, Beef Products International, was proud enough of its now-infamous burger extender to do what no other meat company would: invite filmmaker Robert Kenner into its factory to film its shop floor in action.
The scene, video below, features a Beef Products executive talking over a milieu straight out of Chaplin’s Modern Times: a vast network of steaming tubes, with people in protective gear and face masks wandering about fussing with dials. Pale chunks of fat and sinew are whisked up on a conveyor belt into a machine, from which they emerge as a coarse paste before entering more machines. "From the food safety standpoint, we're ahead of everybody," the exec says, touting his firm's ammonia process. "We think we can lessen the incidence of E. coli O157H7" (a deadly strain). The clip ends with those heavily protected workers carefully shutting the finished product—uniform, flesh-colored blocks—into boxes. Over that image, the exec claims that the product ends up in 70 percent of hamburgers served in the US. "In five years we’ll be in 100 percent," he predicts.
Read more at:
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/pink-slime-school-lunch
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