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

newfoodeconomy.org

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

#181

Post by nate_meurer »

burfog wrote: post #164
uiri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly concerned about the ammonia used during the process. The ammonia is used to kill off germs due to contamination. Maybe we should just throw away contaminated animal by-product.

The intentional mislabeling bothers me most, but yeah I'm not so fond of ammonia. In the human body, ammonia is a lot like alcohol and carbon dioxide: it is a poison that we are well-equipped to remove. Well, sort of. Just as people with lung trouble have problems removing carbon dioxide, people with kidney trouble have problems removing ammonia. What about people with kidney trouble? Perhaps they deserve a warning l…

As a vegetarian myself, I wouldn't dare make excuses for the beef industry, but your argument here is pretty fucking weak. At the high end, LFTB contains about as much ammonia as a lot of commercial bread, and about half of what's in hard cheese. The increase this causes in your body is just noise compared to what comes from your natural protein metabolism. Google for "lftb ammonia ppm" for some numbers.

So no, please, let's not start slapping ammonia warnings on all of our food.

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

#182

Post by scotty79 »

paganel wrote: post #168
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…

It’s really shocking to me, and I’ve eaten lots and lots of meat (including beef) from animals raised and then killed by my close relatives. It’s only that my grand-parents weren’t using a centrifugal thingie to get the most out of the cow they had just sacrificed, and ammonium hydroxide might have been from an alien planet to them. The way we industrially process meat is shocking, yes.

> It’s only that my grand-parents weren’t using a centrifugal thingie

Did our other close relatives use the centrifugal thingie while processing the meat from animals they raised and killed?

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

#183

Post by jakobegger »

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.

I recently saw that they now offer ground beef with less fat at our local supermarket. I assumed that they just put less of the fatty bits inside. Now, I don't live in the US, and I don't know what regulations in Europe say about ground beef, but it does make me hesitate: I absolutely wouldn't have bought the meat if I knew they added pink slime to it to make it less fatty. I'd just buy the fatty ground beef instead.

The problem is not that it shouldn't be allowed -- it just shouldn't pretend to be something it's not.

I literally did not know that the pre-packaged ground meat is different from the ground meat you get at the butcher.

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

#184

Post by an_opabinia »

parasubvert wrote: post #179
doctorpangloss wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people complain about non endogenous to nature processed foods, they don't bring up stupid as shit examples. It's a painful conversation, yes, because everyone has a hard time having a dialogue with moronic levels of pedantry. Maybe if you weren't calling cooking unnatural, and rather just talked about the merits of what people were really objecting too, it would be easier to communicate. This isn't Science of C…

You have no idea what you're talking about, and have the audacity to refer to the parent poster as shit examples? Your response is a disgrace to HN posting standards. How isn't this science of cooking? Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries. Baking soda mostly replaced it but some old recipes still call for it. It's also commonly found in cheeses like Brie. It's in abundance in some fish…

> Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries.

Listen, I obviously didn't know that ammonia bicarbonate was used as a leavening agent for centuries, or that it was made from deer horns, or whatever. :)

Obviously, I also imagined that when a news article says they use ammonia on the beef, they mean ammonia gas (NH3). I don't fault anyone for thinking that either, like gentle John Oliver. Isn't that what they're saying?

I guess those are two different things, ammonia bicarbonate (the leavening agent) and ammonia gas (the thing they do with deer horns), and ammonia in fish (which is something complicated), or brie or something.

Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals, which is the exact thing you were passionately trying to avoid.

It really speaks to my point that these things are really difficult to communicate about, and full of traps, so forgive me for the audacity. It's not ignorance and bliss, there are a tremendous amount of people who can talk to each other about the line between cooking and industrial process in intuitive ways that are not at all poorly informed. Maybe not me personally.

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

#185

Post by scotty79 »

cwyers wrote: post #100
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.

This is why I haaaaaaaaate the Jamie Oliver chicken nuggets video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA Except for the part where the kids totally no sell his smug act and he just stands there dumbstruck. Those chicken trimmings are... chicken. Human history is the history of us figuring out how to extract more edible bits from the animal than our jaws can along (that's how we got soup, among a lot of other thi…

Besides, it all start with killing animal and digging into its corpse. I don't see any high horse to be sat on.

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

#186

Post by radicalbyte »

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?

Given how bad ground beef is for your health you're better off swapping it for ground chicken / quorn / lentils.

I've personally largely switched to veggie ingredients for Lasagne and Moussaka. That was for taste reasons too but the health benefits are a nice bonus ;)

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

#187

Post by idDriven »

joe_the_user wrote: post #134
jdietrich wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. What I am talking about is "doing you have the right know what's happening?" What that is printed on the back of a given label is a different matter, you think? Some people think that FTLB is unsafe, but they have no evidence for tha…

To me the main issue is improper animal husbandry and disgusting slaughterhouse practices directly impact food safety. Grinding beef at the slaughterhouse, using additives even though ammonia is used to make it safer does not make it safe. Bacterial contamination in conventionally processed ground beef is much higher, prevalence of multi-drug resistant bacteria for example was 18% for conventionally processed vs. 6-8% for organic and grass fed respectively. If you scroll to the bottom of the article there are some informative bar graphs. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/how-safe-is-your-gr... Unfortunately for consumers the US Government deregulated the term "grass fed" as of two years ago, therefore it now means there is no legal standard to the term and doesn't really mean anything. You have to trust the supplier. http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/release-usda-revokes-... edit: fixed second link

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

#188

Post by nate_meurer »

uiri wrote: post #30
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.

I'm mostly concerned about the ammonia used during the process. The ammonia is used to kill off germs due to contamination. Maybe we should just throw away contaminated animal by-product.

No need for concern. High estimates for ammonia residues in LFTB are around 400 ppm. A healthy serving will net you tens of milligrams of extra ammonia. In scientific terms that's approximately jack shit. Your body gets rid of many times that amount every time you urinate. A lot more if you're athletic or eat a high protein diet.

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

#190

Post by shawnz »

SECProto wrote: post #155
jdietrich wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!),…

> Separating the meat from the fat in trimmings is good (use more of the meat please!), but the process is not grinding.

What does it mean exactly to be ground? When I look at their product, it looks like it's come out of a meat grinder to me. What does that have to do with the process of separating the fat from the meat which is what is in question here?

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