
What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef" - prostoalex
https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-reclassifed/
======
zdragnar
I think the article linked in the posted one does a better job explaining
what's "news" about this:

[https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-
usda-r...](https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-
reclassifed/)

> Since 1994, the government’s stance has been clear. Lean finely textured
> beef (LFTB) has been a “qualified component” of hamburger, meaning it can be
> included in ground beef without being independently disclosed. But it could
> not itself be called ground beef, suggesting that, in the eyes of regulators
> it was something else—a padding or additive, but not the real deal.

...

> That effort culminated in 2018, when BPI, citing advancements to its
> process, formally asked FSIS to consider whether its product might just be
> called “ground beef.”

> “It was an extensive review that took well over six months and included
> consumer reviews, nutritional panels, tours of the plant where agency folks
> could get a first-hand look at the process and understand what we are doing
> at BPI,” Nick Ross, BPI’s vice president of engineering, told Beef Magazine,
> a trade publication that covers the cattle industry.

~~~
dang
Ok, we've changed the URL to that from [https://qz.com/1552580/the-us-
government-has-redefined-pink-...](https://qz.com/1552580/the-us-government-
has-redefined-pink-slime-as-ground-beef/). Thanks!

~~~
joe_the_user
I'm sorry, the languaging in this re-linking sounds like so much like industry
shilling. _" That product is then sterilized with a strong puff of ammonia gas
to kill pathogens, as beef trimmings are especially susceptible to
contamination."_

With an elaborate explanation for each "terrible sounding" detail (what is
this "puff" exactly, etc).

... except the sum total of the "terrible sounding" stuff is actually
distinctly unappealing imo and only by stringing things across elaborate,
carefully couched discussions is it plausible-seeming that this is "ground
beef".

Basically, pink slime is highly processed leavings of beef that cannot be used
except by putting it through more or less a blender and a chemistry lab. That
fact leaves many consumers nervous when this is revealed. And this ruling
isn't about whether you can produce this stuff but rather whether you have to
tell people about it. Most people would like to know. You can judge the ruling
based on that.

~~~
jdietrich
_> Basically, pink slime is highly processed leavings of beef that cannot be
used except by putting it through more or less a blender and a chemistry lab._

After butchering a carcass, you're left with a lot of fatty trimmings with
small amounts of meat attached that are uneconomical to recover by hand. If
you gently heat the fat trimmings and spin them in a centrifuge, you cleanly
separate the lean meat from the fat. That process weakens the cell walls of
the muscle fibres, which increases the risk of bacterial growth; to kill the
bacteria, ammonium hydroxide gas is used to raise the pH. The FDA deems
ammonium hydroxide to be safe, so it is widely used in US food manufacturing
as an acidity regulator and antimicrobial agent. Other regulators disagree on
the safety of ammonium hydroxide, in which case citric acid is used.

The production of LFTB is no weirder than any number of other food processes.
It's a simple, efficient method for separating meat from fat. The media have
made a mountain out of a molehill by sensationally revealing a "shocking
secret" that is neither shocking nor secret. Personally, I think that a lot of
consumers just prefer not to think about how meat ends up on their plate and
recoil at any discussion of the process that turns live animals into hamburger
patties.

We really need to be talking about the use of antibiotics as a growth
promoter, which is a slow-motion catastrophe that the US regulators are
largely ignoring.

~~~
behringer
So if I want to eat nice meat cuts ground up, without getting slime, what do I
do?

~~~
jannyfer
In Canada, you can go to a local grocery store or meat shop and choose meat
cuts and have them grind them for you on the spot.

~~~
prepend
In the US too, all major grocery stores in my area you can ask them to grind
up a chuck roast or any cut of meat and they will. It costs a little more
depending on the price of the cut you select.

------
tptacek
Why is this supposed to upset me? If we're going to keep eating animals (and
that sure is my plan), we shouldn't give ourselves the luxury of getting
squicked out over using the whole animal.

If you're picky about what's in your ground beef, find a butcher you trust, or
grind your own.

~~~
jdietrich
_> Why is this supposed to upset me?_

The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have
a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with
health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the
social class of who eats what.

Advanced meat recovery is the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating, allowing us to
make use of almost every gram of edible meat on a carcass. If we're going to
keep eating meat, we should celebrate advanced meat recovery in the same way
that foodies celebrate unfashionable cuts or offal meat. We don't, because
recovered meat is cheap and therefore has negative signalling value. The kind
of people who buy grass-fed organic beef would never dream of knowingly eating
"pink slime" or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious
environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that
would otherwise go to waste.

Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean
beef, because it _is_ lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns
about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured
beef, but it's widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily
substituted by citric acid in this application. If you're concerned about
health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to
get more meat from every carcass.

(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)

~~~
burfog
It's not honestly lean beef. If it were, it would be red.

It's connective tissue, with a bit of lean beef mixed in. This has a different
nutritional profile. There is less iron, and the amino acid proportions are
different.

We could call it "pureed tendons, ligaments, defatted fat tissue, cartilage,
lean beef, and ammonia or citric acid". That is a long and unwieldy name. The
common name, known to consumers, is pink slime.

~~~
dmurray
Using "beef" to mean "unspecified bits of cow used as food" isn't exactly
butchering the English language.

~~~
RHSeeger
Using "ground" to mean something that isn't actually run through a grinder,
and "ground beef" to mean something the is created differently than what
people have called "ground beef" is intentionally misleading. I honestly can't
even imagine how anyone can see it any other way; it's baffling to me.

------
gdubs
This conversation shows that plenty of people are uncomfortable with a food
process like this. Many of you point out that food is complex, and people are
irrational to be squeamish about this particular process.

But how about this? Maybe people wouldn’t eat so much meat if they were more
aware of the process behind it? And maybe, given how detrimental meat
production had been to the environment, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

So, rather than protecting people by hiding the truth behind the processes
that are behind the food they eat, we should be more transparent.

If that means we go back to small farms, local butcheries — something people
_have_ been comfortable with for centuries — it would of course raise the cost
of meat. But If we hope to address climate change, that absolutely needs to
happen.

~~~
sexyflanders
>So, rather than protecting people by hiding the truth behind the processes
that are behind the food they eat, we should be more transparent.

I agree, but in order to be transparent the ingredients and processes would
need to be disclosed (ideally on the packaging) and this news seems a step
further in the opposite direction.

------
hn_throwaway_99
Posting this snopes link at the top level, because there is a lot of
misinformation in these comments: [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/legal-
separation/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/legal-separation/)

Lean finely textured beef (what is called "pink slime" in the main article) is
NOT the same thing, nor it is a further refinement, of mechanically separated
meat. Mechanically separated beef, which increases dangers of "mad cow
disease" because it can cause neural tissue to be included in the final
product, is _not allowed_ for human consumption in the US.

------
supportlocal4h
For those who don't have a personal butcher, you might be interested to
know...

Many state and county fairs include a livestock show. Often the exhibited
animals are auctioned off at the end of the show. The animals are raised and
exhibited by youth (4H, FFA, etc). The proceeds go to the (child) owner of the
animal.

At our county fair, bidding starts at about $3/# on the hoof. They generally
weigh between 1100# and 1500#. Butchers present at the auction take your order
on exactly how you want it cut. The seller will show up on your doorstep with
it cut, wrapped, and frozen. No charge beyond the bid price. Seller takes care
of everything. Cost above market price is tax deductible.

Some of the best beef money can buy. Can help fund college. Swine, lamb, goat,
etc might also be available at a show near you. If a whole beef is too much,
go in with a group. A group of 4 can end up with 100+# each for less than
$1000 a piece.

If this doesn't describe a livestock show near you, shop around. If none of
this sounds like your cup of tea, forget I said anything.

~~~
lifeformed
Interesting. Do you know what percentage of the animal is edible meat?

~~~
supportlocal4h
Carcass yield for beef is around 63%. A 1200# steer will dress out around
750#. Minus bones takes you down to about 500#.

$4/# on the hoof gets you $9.60/# hamburger. And $9.60/# ribeye.

------
Meekro
The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and
later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest
defamation settlement in the history of the United States.

The story took on a life of its own, though. This image[1] became synonymous
with "pink slime" (and still appears in a Google image search for the term)
even though nobody knows where the image came from. Didn't stop The Young
Turks (among others) from associating it with McDonalds, though.

[1]
[https://janrssor.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/pinkslime.jpg](https://janrssor.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/pinkslime.jpg)

~~~
coldtea
> _The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and
> later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest
> defamation settlement in the history of the United States._

I'd say this "beef" is fake meat -- whether some court agrees or not (that
depends on who has the best lawyers and deeper pockets, not on who has the
best food).

I'd be OK with companies being allowed to sell all kinds of crap as foodstuff,
if they didn't highjack on existing food labels as it's the regular beef
people know to fool consumers and paint a picture.

~~~
doctorpangloss
People have had so much trouble getting over words we use to describe food.

Clearly, when a normal person says "real" or "natural" or "doesn't have
chemicals", they mean foods that are (1) made only with ingredients or
processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2)
when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. This seems
reasonable to me!

That's why it's okay to eat beef that someone used a machine to separate, but
it's not okay to eat beef treated with ammonia. Nothing in nature produces
food by treating in with ammonia!

This is reminiscent of the MSG scare. It was never about MSG as an underlying
ingredient or racism (everyone loves Chinese food). As Wikipedia says, it's
been a component of flavors "as early as 5,500 BCE." What changed is that it
was manufactured industrially with "hydrolysis of vegetable proteins with
hydrochloric acid to disrupt peptide bonds (1909–1962); direct chemical
synthesis with acrylonitrile (1962–1973), and bacterial fermentation (the
current method)." Its acceptance and rejection over time follows pretty much
precisely how non-endogenous-to-nature the manufacturing process is.

I'm not making a value judgement if non-endogenous-to-nature foods are good or
bad. I'm just saying I agree with you, and that it's actually really clear and
easy to define scientifically what people mean when they say "natural" versus
"fake."

It's just that science pedants are really stubborn. They parrot their
"dihydrogen monoxide" and "chemicals" jokes and they don't really get that
there's a long history of industrial, non-endogenous-to-nature manufacturing
betraying consumers with nasty side effects, pollution and disease. It's
really unempathetic to people and it's not good for real scientific goals,
like reducing our impact on the environment and improving trust in science.

~~~
jdietrich
_> Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia!_

We are the only thing in nature that "produces" food - every other species
photosynthesises, hunts or grazes. We're the only species that can cook. Is
cooking unnatural?

 _> made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms
without human intervention_

Where do you draw the line? Is wheat flour "unnatural" because we winnow off
the chaff and grind the grains? Does a chicken leg become "unnatural" if you
pluck it and skin it? Does milk become unnatural if you churn it into butter?
Does butter become unnatural if you clarify it into ghee?

The whole distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is meaningless in any
practical sense. Either everything we do is "natural" because we're animals,
or everything that we do that apes can't is "unnatural". Either only a raw
food diet is natural, or everything is natural. There's no logical distinction
between the complex chemistry we perform in our kitchens every day and the
complex chemistry that occurs in industrial food production, just a vague
squeamishness.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
None of your examples involve adding a chemical to the food that does not
occur naturally already in food.

Most of your examples just involve preparation, which would not make it
unnatural.

~~~
jdietrich
Cooking. Frying or roasting produce diacetyl, acrylamide and all sorts of
other potentially toxic substances that don't naturally occur in the food
being cooked.

What about fermentation? The production of cheese or bread produces all sorts
of chemicals that don't naturally occur in milk or wheat - are those chemicals
"natural"? Does your opinion change if I told you that most monosodium
glutamate is produced through industrial fermentation?

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
I'm not against adding chemicals to food. I was just pointing out flaws in the
examples.

We should test foods to the best of our ability to make sure they are safe,
but I don't think there should be many restrictions otherwise.

------
tantalor
Ironic that this comes as beef & milk suppliers are complaining about
"impossible burgers" simulated meat and almond "milk" stealing their precious
terminology.

~~~
cc439
Ironic that this comment comes in response to an article about a slightly-
more-than-normal processed meat product in support of hyper processed
replacements for generally lightly processed meat and dairy products.

~~~
tantalor
Almond milk is not hyper processed. You can make it by hand.

------
jonnycoder
I use trimmings from deer and elk meat that I harvest and butcher myself and
grind into ground meat. Only difference is those animals are much leaner with
little fat and I don’t use a centrifuge with ammonia. If you like burgers and
such, I highly recommend grinding your own chuck or nicer cuts of beef.

~~~
cimmanom
This isn’t just ground chuck. That’s the whole point.

~~~
jonnycoder
No, ground chuck != ground beef. I do wish it was common to buy actual ground
chuck though.

~~~
cimmanom
How is ground chuck not ground beef? Chuck is a cut. You can also get it cubed
- it makes great stew meat.

------
CivBase
If the article's description of how "pink slime" is made is accurate, I think
calling it "ground beef" is a bit disingenuous. It's still "beef", but I think
most people would agree that the term "ground beef" implies that the product
was created by grinding up raw cuts of beef. "Separated beef" or "lean finely
textured beef" or even just "lean beef" all seem like more appropriate names.

I think using "pink slime" as an aditive for ground beef should be fine as
long as it is disclosed by the seller. Actually calling it "ground beef" is a
step too far, though.

Next we'll start calling pizza a vegetable.

Wait no.

------
StillBored
Are these articles a bit misleading about the "trimmings"? My understanding is
that a large part of the controversy is because its not little pieces of
"meat" its basically the garbage, tendons, pieces of skin, bits of bone, etc.
Sure some of it has meat attached, but the difficulty separating the meat bits
from the rest is what requires the intensive liquefaction process. The fact
that it happens to liquefy some of the normally inedible parts as well is just
a bonus.

~~~
Pharmakon
Generally speaking when everything has been taken off the carcass, including
parts used for animal feed, the remains are blasted by high pressure water.
The resulting tissue, much of it membranes and other fascia are then collected
and processed. It is as you say, not really meat, it’s mostly a collagen
slurry. In the cases of turkey and chicken the term used is “mechanically
separated.” You can find that term on any Slim-Jim.

~~~
zdragnar
This isn't about mechanically separated chicken or turkey, it's about "Lean
finely textured beef (LFTB)", which is actually leaner than the ground meat
that it gets mixed in with.

~~~
Pharmakon
...Which is the same product, centrifuged and ammoniated.

~~~
KAMSPioneer
LFTB is not made from mechanically separated meat. It is made from normal
boneless beef trimmings. As has been pointed out in response to numerous such
claims all over this thread.

Source:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/documents/meat-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/documents/meat-
industry-and-government-records) (look on page 26)

------
coldtea
If an industry lobby pushes enough, a state "food standards" organization will
call anything food.

After all, they don't start with a "let's not divert from regular wholesome
food" as a mission statement. So why not allow all kinds of crap as food, as
long as they are barely edible and with no obvious side effects?

Worked fine since the 50s in the US, and the quality of the food the average
american eats (and their health) keeps improving... /s

------
alkonaut
Idea: stop worrying about what part of the animal it is, and worry about the
important things like whether it got growth hormones, antibiotics for growth
and so on. Don’t buy beef (or other meat) that did.

------
porphyrogene
Former butcher turned coder here. If this concerns you just find a meat
counter that grinds their meats in-house. It is an incredibly easy thing to do
and it is very economical as whole sealed sub-primals keep for much longer
than ground beef, which begins to oxidize and change color much more quickly
than it goes bad. That means you have to grind new beef about every other day
even if it isn't selling. We used to take the unsold ground beef and freeze it
before it oxidized too much for people who wanted to stock their freezer.

------
newnewpdro
PSA: your grocery store butcher will grind up a steak of your choosing for you
at no cost, you only need to ask.

I didn't know people bought pre-ground beef until moving out of my parents'
home. Growing up, whenever we went shopping, my mother would start at the meat
department, pick out a cheap steak, and ask the butcher to grind it up. We'd
return for it later before heading to the cashier. I thought this was the
standard operating procedure, as well as eating home-cooked hamburgers bloody
rare.

~~~
leetcrew
no, you just have parents that care about food.

~~~
Latty
And are wealthy enough to make this choice.

I can't speak for the US, so maybe it is different, but here in the UK even
the cheapest steak will set you back far more per kilo than minced beef.

~~~
newnewpdro
Wealthy is not how I'd describe my parents; a construction worker with a stay
at home housewife and three kids.

There are often steaks for sale on the refrigerated shelves adjacent to the
butcher counter/case. Maybe that's not so common in the UK? The supermarkets
here regularly have meat wrapped in clear plastic and carrying bright orange
stickers on clearance, it's what happens to the case-resident stuff when new
stock arrives.

My mother would familiarize herself with the schedule of deliveries at the
stores she frequented. She knew when and where she could get the freshest
stuff for special occasions, as well as when things went on sale to make room
for the new meat, keeping our freeezer full of staples.

I don't think it requires wealth so much as it requires some care and effort.
These are the kinds of duties a traditional housewife would take on, but I
don't personally find it particularly difficult to chat up the butcher and do
more or less the same thing as a bachelor.

------
pmarreck
[https://impossiblefoods.com](https://impossiblefoods.com)

I’m just going to leave the future right here

~~~
newnewpdro
More heavily-processed industrial food products, yum!

~~~
pmarreck
FFS, this gives the people what they want without imprisoning and killing cows
for food. Maybe have some evidence that it’s unhealthy before you bullshit a
negativity next time

~~~
x43b
Significant number of carbs and has added sugar, sounds less nutritious than
hamburger to me.

~~~
heyjudy
Upton Sinclair effect right here. Let's keep supporting a major source of
climate change, obesity, antibiotic resistance, animal cruelty and heart
disease because you want a hamburger... nothing else is good enough for you,
focus on the negatives, discard all of the positives.

~~~
pmarreck
Yeah, I cannot fathom our downvotes either

------
heyjudy
Wow.

About 30 years ago, my now departed grandmother was at her favorite Italian
grocery store comparing sirloin to ground sirloin and noticed a price
difference. She asked the butcher about the truth of what was in the ground
sirloin. "We couldn't sell it at that price without adding things to it." From
then on, she bought only sirloin steaks and ground her own at home.

In the absence of sensible government regulations and enforcement, cut-throat
capitalism drives individuals and corporations to cut corners and keep cutting
more corners until Bhopal or Mad Cow Disease happen.

Disclaimer: I don't eat animals.

------
JustSomeNobody
I wonder if cases of tainted beef are going to go up now because it will be
harder to keep this stuff clean.

------
Grue3
This seems like optimal usage of resources, reusing the unneeded parts of the
dead animal to create something edible. This should be celebrated, and it's
something humanity has done for centuries.

~~~
jakobegger
And its totally fine if people use the fatty trimmings to make sausage, like
we've been doing for centuries.

It's not okay if we process the fatty trimmings, heat them, centrifuge them,
and then add them to ground beef to lower the fat content to make it look like
the product was made from better bits of the animal.

Using more of the animal is a good thing, but misleading customers is not the
way to do that.

------
brandonmenc
Pretty sure I saw this quote here a while back:

"When indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it
respect.

Do it in a factory and all of the sudden it is gross."

~~~
warent
It's not surprising that we can make anything sound however we want by
stripping away the context. Let's try adding it back in.

"When indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it
respect.

Do it in a factory [producing a collagen/cartilage slurry cleansed with
ammonia; to maximize profits], and all of the sudden it is gross."

~~~
cc439
Producing a collagen/cartilage slurry is also known as making a broth or a
stew.

------
lurquer
"Whipped Beef" sounds tastier. That's what I'd call it... or maybe "Creamed
Beef" or "Beef Pudding".

With a good food photographer, I'm sure you could make a cup of 'pink slime'
look tasty.

Indeed, look at a typical close-up photo of Jello-Pudding... creamy, silky,
scrumptious. That it's made out of horse hooves doesn't even cross one's mind.

------
rubyfan
Gross. I can’t wait for Impossible Burger to hit the grocery store.

~~~
phyzome
I tried some the other day. It tasted _precisely_ like a shitty fast-food
burger. Which is to say... ground meat with "lean finely textured beef" mixed
in.

Impossible Burger tastes the same as that product, and is made via just as
industrial a process, so don't switch on those accounts.

You want to stop eating meat? That's a perfectly fine reason! But switching
because of LFTB would be pretty silly.

------
mbrodersen
A friend of mine (Seattle/US) was blown away by the quality of beef here in
Australia compared with the US. That is what higher food standards give you.

~~~
longhairedhippy
As a counter-anecdote, my friend from Australia was blown away at the quality
of beef in the US. I'm not saying either person is right or wrong, however it
does seem to be somewhat subjective.

------
onetimemanytime
I thought this was artificial meat or something. Just fatty parts have their
fat removed. Processed yeah but so what, a lot of what we eat is processed.

------
snambi
The solution is to stop eating processed food. thats all.

------
elchief
You should probably just grind your own meat at this point

------
rdlecler1
Couldn’t this be solved by grading the ground beef?

------
kevin_thibedeau
Mass market hot dogs are just pink slime too. So now they can be ground beef.

------
hskaw
Pink slime is banned from human consumption in the European Union.

~~~
jeffdavis
Why? Sincere question. Is it unhealthy or not nutritious?

~~~
Symbiote
I'm not sure why the EU bans it, but Canada bans it because of the ammonia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime)
(see some of the references)

~~~
tootie
Surely it can be sanitized with something else. Radiation or whatever.

~~~
gruez
It can, but it would probably make it too expensive compared to the real
stuff. They're already going through a lot of steps to make the slime as it
is.

------
HocusLocus
misfolded proteins

be very afraid

be very afraid

be very afraid

~~~
heyjudy
_Don 't worry, by the time people find out we gave them Mad Cow in 40-50
years, we can stack up all the extra profits in a Caribbean bank and be
sipping margaritas with small grains of salt served by hula girls on a whole
fleet of yachts._

~~~
crankylinuxuser
BTW what is the average time CJD or BSE sets in humans?

Do you have a study to point at that would show some sort of timeframe?

------
SeriousM
I don't care. And you know why? I'M VEGAN.

~~~
Ensorceled
There has to be room amongst the woke for the awakening. You’re not helping.

------
stevebmark
This makes me want to eat pink slime more, sounds like it's just entirely
healthy rendered fat that ignorant Americans think is unhealthy so they remove
it from the cuts, losing flavor and nutrients. I didn't realize "pink slime"
was the discarded healthier, flavorful cuts of meat.

~~~
crooked-v
"Pink slime" is made of the very last bits of meat and collagen remaining on
the bones, mechanically scraped off and then put through a centrifuge to
remove fat, extruded as thin tubes that are processed with ammonia or citric
acid to kill off bacteria, then finely ground and compressed into blocks for
shipping. It's only a "flavorful cut" if you consider your "flavorful cuts" to
include "whatever remnants can be scraped off the spinal column after every
bit of non-mechanical butchering is finished".

