You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few
years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you
eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids'
school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your
supermarket:
According to today's New York Times, 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."
This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is
now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated
with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage," and turned into "a mashlike
substance frozen into blocks or chips".
Thus saving THREE CENTS a pound off production costs. And making
the company, Beef Products Inc., a fortune. $440 million/year in
revenue. Ain't that something?
And to emphasize: this pink slime isn't just in fast food
burgers or free lunches for poor kids:
With the U.S.D.A.'s stamp of approval, the
company's processed beef has become a mainstay in America's
hamburgers. 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.
Bush's U.S.D.A. also allowed these "innovators" to get away with
listing the ammonia as "a processing agent" instead of by name.
And they also OKd the processing method -- and later exempted
the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general
public -- strictly based on the company's claims of safety,
which were not backed by any independent testing.
Because the ammonia taste was so bad ("It was frozen, but you
could still smell ammonia," said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia
agriculture department official. "I've never seen anything like
it.") the company started using a less alkaline ammonia
treatment, and now we know -- thanks to testing done for the
school lunch program -- that the nasty stuff isn't even reliably
killing the pathogens.