Grist: Lessons on the food system from the ammonia-hamburger fiasco

[marmar]

Lessons on the food system from the ammonia-hamburger fiasco
5 Jan 2010 1:04 PM

by Tom Philpott


In case you missed it last week, The New York Times ran an excellent article on a South Dakota company called Beef Products Inc., which makes a hamburger filler product that ends up in 70 percent of burgers in the United States.

To make a long story short: Beef Products buys 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. It sends the scraps through a series of machines, grinds them into a paste, separates out the fat, and laces the substance with ammonia to kill pathogens.

The result, known by some in the industry as “pink slime,” is marketed widely to hamburger makers. The product has three selling points, from what I can tell: 1) it’s really, really cheap; 2) unlike conventional grpund beef, which routinely carries E. coli, etc, pink slime is sterilized by the addition of ammonia; and 3) it’s so full of ammonia that it will kill pathogens in the ground beef it’s mixed with.

In short, Beef Products’ is peddling a solution—and a cheap one at that—to the beef industry’s embarrassing food-borne-illness problem (see my Meat Wagon series of posts for more on this topic). No wonder that burger purveyors from agribusiness giant Cargill to McDonald’s, from Burger King to your kid’s public-school cafeteria, snap up 60 pound blocks of pink slime and mix it into conventional ground beef at doses of up to 15 percent.

But as the Times story shows, the ammonia doesn’t always kill the pathogens in pink slime. Indeed, far from sterilizing a batch of burger mix, pink slime can actually add to the pathogen cocktail:

School lunch officials said that in some years Beef Products testing results were worse than many of the program’s two dozen other suppliers, which use traditional meat processing methods. From 2005 to 2009, Beef Products had a rate of 36 positive results for salmonella per 1,000 tests, compared to a rate of nine positive results per 1,000 tests for the other suppliers, according to statistics from the program.

Thus, of pink slime’s three chief selling points, only one holds up to scrutiny: it’s cheap. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-05-cheap-food-ammonia-burgers/

[SallyMander]

1. ew ew EW

Another reason to be glad i'm a vegetarian! :puke:

[marmar]

2. Stories like this one seriously make me want to give up meat.....

..... and actually, I'm experimenting with a mostly vegetarian diet right now.

[uppityperson]

4. Stories like this made me buy/eat only meat I know.

I found a source of local beef, raise my own poultry. No more buying or eating public beef, chicken

[SallyMander]

6. I've been vegetarian for so long that it's just habit now

and i don't imagine i'll ever eat meat again -- but if i did, i would definitely get it from some small, local vendor, to reduce the ecofootprint and the chance of this kind of disgusting practice!

[Gman2]

3. I think your last point nails a little known aspect.

It makes for increases of shelf life. As for truth in labeling, FUCK THEM. I worked for a few months, in the meat dept. I have scraped up the grease/guts off the floor. To now mix that back in, is an insult to us, the socalled consumer/customer/king.

[T Wolf]

5. I've not eaten meat since 1976 and not-so-secretly love stories like this that shine the

light of day on the "food" system in this country.

It is amazing how many food-product alerts and recalls I have been able to ignore over the last 33 years.