Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

newfoodeconomy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 320 posts

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#151

Post by burfog »

jdietrich wrote: post #39
tptacek wrote: post #3

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.

>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…

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.

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#152

Post by sp332 »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #135
sjwright wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you let your steak dry before cooking, do you list the airborne dust and bacteria as ingredients?

The whole issue here isn’t the outside of the meat. The outside is supposed to have bacteria, and be cooked off. It’s that re-shaped meat is done with meat product that is made up of a lot of outside surface (the part that has all the bacteria) now being smashed to the inside of the product where it won’t get hot enough to kill. The inside of beef is quite clean, that’s why it’s safe to eat rare. The inside of reshap…

Isn't that problem shared by all ground beef?

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#153

Post by rdlecler1 »

NoblePublius wrote: post #20
tptacek wrote: post #3

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.

The issue here is that the government doesn’t force food makers to distinguish a whole muscle ground into mince from 100,000 scraps soaked in Mr. Clean in a pressure cooker.

They sure would so your argument sort of breaks down here because while you are implying they’re soaking this in Mr Clean that’s not what’s happening.

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#154

Post by analog31 »

behringer wrote: post #141
jdietrich wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Th…

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

My mom had a crank operated grinder that was mainly for making sausage but worked pretty well. Where it came from is relegated to the forgotten past.

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#155

Post by SECProto »

jdietrich wrote: post #131
joe_the_user wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

>That's a fine sell. Now sell me on, "this is so OK that we should have a statutory right not to ever mention this fact. Food production is really, really complex. If an organic burrito was labelled with every process involved in its production, it would come with a label the size of a telephone directory. Over-labelling is just as problematic as under-labelling, as we have seen with Prop 65; adding more words to a l…

> Food production is really, really complex. If an organic burrito was labelled with every process involved in its production, it would come with a label the size of a telephone directory.

I agree with this take in general. But in labelling a product "ground beef", a consumer would consider the ingredients to be beef that is ground. Separating the meat from the fat in trimmings is good (use more of the meat please!), but the process is not grinding. If the market determines "heat-separated ground beef" (or whatever) to be less appealing, then perhaps they're right that it should demand a lower markup.

It's about nomenclature, not safety.

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#156

Post by gregcrv »

jdietrich wrote: post #127
doctorpangloss wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

>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 an…

No, your are not the only thing in nature that « produces » food. Here is on example but they are many more.

https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-...

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#157

Post by freeone3000 »

hskaw wrote: post #64
jdietrich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This is very dishonest. Pink slime contains connective tissue and muscle. There's no way it's equivalent in terms of nutritional value to actual meat. And don't forget it's treated with ammonia , which is the reason it's banned in the first world.

A ribeye steak is comprised of connective tissue and muscle. Of course it's the same nutritionally, because it's the same stuff.

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#158

Post by [deleted] »

burfog wrote: post #151
jdietrich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

#160

Post by samatman »

jdietrich wrote: post #124
joe_the_user wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distinctl…

>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. Th…

Fine as far as it goes.

I would assert there is less difference between sirloin and skirt steak than there is between ground beef and LFTB.

It’s illegal to claim that skirt steak is sirloin. Why should it be legal to call LFTB ground beef?

Post reply on HN