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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"

#221

Post by darkerside »

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…

It's fine that food production is complex. And people don't know every process that goes into making their food. But when an individual process is uncovered in the media, and there is a public outcry, the answer is not to hide it from future oversight under the pretense that people are idiots.

If it's not a big deal, educate people and don't worry that it's not considered "ground beef" (because, come on, it's not).

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

#222

Post by radicalbyte »

radicalbyte wrote: post #186
behringer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I'm surprised that I'm getting so many downvotes for this post? Are people so scared by even the mention of eating a meal without meat?

I eat a healthy and well balanced diet and I honestly don't understand that way of thinking from my fellow carnivores.

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

#223

Post by shawnz »

arcticfox wrote: post #218
shawnz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

So the argument here is that it's mislabeled because it wasn't crushed with a lateral motion? And that's misleading to customers?

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

#225

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

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…

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.

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

#227

Post by sp332 »

adrr wrote: post #129
sp332 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but it's only separated from the fat. They're not sorting out bone or nerve tissue from the meat. It's like centrifugally-trimmed beef.

You do agree it shouldn’t be called be ground beef?

I wouldn't mind if it were labelled better. But from the consumer point of view, what's the difference? The texture is different and it's been disinfected. Doesn't seem like a huge deal.

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

#228

Post by fl0wenol »

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…

Guessing you're not a big fan of combination beef pho.

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

#229

Post by dEnigma »

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?

From the regulations linked in the article:

‘‘Chopped Beef’’ or ‘‘Ground Beef’’ shall consist of chopped fresh and/or frozen beef with or without seasoning and without the addition of beef fat as such, shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders. When beef cheek meat (trimmed beef cheeks) is used in the preparation of chopped or ground beef, the amount of such cheek meat shall be limited to 25 percent; and if in ex- cess of natural proportions, its presence shall be declared on the label[...].

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

joe_the_user wrote: post #128
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…

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…

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