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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"

#211

Post by Retric »

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…

Which is ok, but when grinding is not involved calling something ground is directly misleading.

If I sell a taco and never mention what it’s made of then sure. It’s only when I sell taco and say this is made from beef but actually mostly contains soy that people are going to get upset. Similarly, if I say ground beef, I would expect actual grinding to be involved not some other process.

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

#212

Post by dmurray »

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…

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

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

#213

Post by bjoli »

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 am fascinated with your ability to be contrarian! But are you really sure you can't understand why it should upset you?

We generalise a large part of your understanding of the world down to words. When someone (in this case UDSA) redefines ground beef to mean something else that you find icky, of yourself you are upset.

I do think this is a problem since redefining foodstuffs will eventually lead to people distrusting the whole industry.

Ground beef should be parts of beef that have been ground down. Not slabs of defatted chemically treated leftovers. It is a redefinition of a phrase that is directly misleading to customers.

I am all for eating everything from dead animals, if we are to continue eating them. People are fricking squeamish.

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

#214

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #76
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This puree includes bone, bone marrow, skin, nerves, blood vessels, and the scraps of meat remaining on the bones. Is there something inherently wrong with eating any of this stuff? People eat heart, liver, kidney. I can’t see how bone and skin, or blood vessels could be bad for you.

Nerve tissues can carry prion diseases. Here's a study[1] on bovine prions in peripheral nerve tissue. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321908/

Genuine question: does regular muscle meat contain any nerves? I was under the impression all of our muscles contain efferent neurons to deliver motor control signals and afferent neurons to send back stretch reception signals / proprioception / pain.

But I wouldn't know exactly where these nerve fibres are located and if they're completely removed from regular cuts of meat.

Another question is: do the prions accumulate and remain in the main body (soma) of the nerve cell, or do the prions diffuse throughout the axons and dendrites of the nerve cells.

If prions remain within the soma, then removing nerve ganglia from products intended for human consumption or animal feed would, one supposes, limit the spread of prions.

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

#216

Post by dzdt »

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?

Go to a grocery store or meat shop which does their own grinding. The pink slime processing is only economical at the hugest industrial scales. Anything processed at a smaller, more local scale won't have that.

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

#218

Post by arcticfox »

shawnz wrote: post #190
SECProto wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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.

I can show you some incredible fake and inedible food that looks just like the real thing. Appearance isn't really a good measure for what something is.

As for what it means to grind: "To reduce to smaller pieces by crushing with lateral motion." I don't think the process meets any reasonable definition of ground.

I'd probably personally buy it, but I'd really want it to be labeled in some other way.

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

#219

Post by sp332 »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #169
sp332 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that problem shared by all ground beef?

You aren’t supposed to eat ground beef rare. Steaks you can. If you don’t know your steak is partially ground beef, that’s the issue.

I think I'm missing what you're worried about. The article says that pink slime can be called "ground beef", not that it can be called steak.

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

#220

Post by deogeo »

jdietrich wrote: post #115
bsanr2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's projection. The real class conflict in play here is that the meat that is well-established as safe and healthy for consumption - as far as meat goes - is only affordable for the affluent. Everyone else has to eat meat that is processed so as to obscure its origins and make it more primarily amenable to storage, transportation, and, ultimately, sale. And not primarily, you know, health.

The FDA have deemed LFTB to be safe. Several other regulators apply restrictions on the use of ammonia in food processing, but deem FTB processed using citric acid to be safe. Do you have evidence that putting beef scraps in a centrifuge to separate meat from fat is dangerous? Do you have evidence to show that the resulting meat is in any way less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered meat? We know th…

Because it's tastier and less processed, more natural. How well that correlates with being healthy is another matter, but I really have no idea where you're getting classism. No one thinks "Mmmm, what an expensive piece of meat. I bet the poors can't afford it - I'm buying it!"
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