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

231–240 of 320 posts

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

#231

Post by wolco »

nate_meurer wrote: post #199
wolco wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not at all. A handful of companies in a few products use ammonia. Cheese, chocolate and baked goods. For baked goods they claim it evaporates. Cheap cheeses use it to speed up growth. Some foods breakdown into ammonia so our bodies can handle it but constant higher levels can cause illness as it overwhelms the body.

Some foods? You mean, like, literally all digestible proteins? > but constant higher levels can cause illness as it overwhelms the body. Note that this has nothing to do with the tiny residual levels of ammonia in bread, cheese (both cheap and expensive), and meat products of all kinds. Your body produces and excretes an order of magnitude more ammonia than what you eat directly from food, and will easily do far more…

The bacteria in your body produce waste ammonia, hydrogen, methaine. Your body using the detoxication channels available to remove them. If the body is unable to you get sick.

Throwing in more ammonia will cause more stress on these pathways. Bodies can only handle so much we try to counteract these with things to detoxify like rest, exercise, other foods, etc.

Eat pink slime through your 20s might be okay the older you get the less your body will be able to handle pink slime for breakfast.

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

#232

Post by NoblePublius »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #153
NoblePublius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s ammonia. Mr Clean is ammonia.

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

#233

Post by notyourday »

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.

Not at all. The fact that this is even being brought up in the argument illustrates how much the industry needs to be regulated.

I had an organic burrito on Thursday because my wife in our old age is obsessed at buying only organic products... largely from a bodega in a Dominican area of Brooklyn -- not even Whole Foods.

The following are the ingredients involved:

1. Flour tortilla -- made in Brooklyn by a small plant that sells them to bodegas and small supermarkets. In a strange coincidence I used to walk by that plant and I talked to the family that owns it. The tortilla contains the following ingredients:

* Flour, Salt, baking soda, pork fat, water

their tortillas keep in a fridge for about a week and half. I asked him why would not he add preservatives? His answer was "Because they cost money and tortillas dont taste as good. Mine are a bit more expensive than the ones from giant companies but I make a lot more money than them"

* Ground beef ( could be organic )

She buys it from the butcher that grinds it on premises or at Whole Foods or I buy a whole 30 lb of sirloin and grind it myself.

* Dried beans ( could be organic )

* Rice ( could be organic )

* Tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, radish, jalapeno, cucumbers, avocado, limes ( all could be organic )

* Cumin, salt, pepper

* Sour cream ( mostly organic but definitely that as the totality has the following ingredient list: milk, enzymes )

That's what an organic burrito looks like. If you are on a west coast, especially in SF it would be called "Mission Burrito". Cheap as hell because it has no extra process inputs. Qdoba and Chipotle manage to make gobs of money selling them: because their COG on one are about $2.50.

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

#234

Post by cimmanom »

jonnycoder wrote: post #4

I use trimmings from deer and elk meat that I harvest and butcher myself and grind into ground meat. Only difference is those animals are much leaner with little fat and I don’t use a centrifuge with ammonia. If you like burgers and such, I highly recommend grinding your own chuck or nicer cuts of beef.

This isn’t just ground chuck. That’s the whole point.

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

#235

Post by ecocentrik »

Meekro wrote: post #14

The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest defamation settlement in the history of the United States. The story took on a life of its own, though. This image[1] became synonymous with "pink slime" (and still appears in a Google image search for the term) even though nobody knows where the image came from. Didn't sto…

Successful litigation does not make something true/false. The court, in a case like this, does not rule on the quality of the chemical process or the effects of short/long term human ingestion. Settlement amounts are based on potential damages to sales.

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

#236

Post by notyourday »

darkerside wrote: post #221
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…

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).

Some food processes are complex. Ground beef is not. Making it involves taking the meat off the carcass, trimming the fat and putting it through a grinder -- either the industrial sized one or typically smaller sized ones that are found in the meat departments of any reasonable super market.

As far as "but what are we going to do with those other trimmings?" -- go to any Asian or Hispanic supermarket and see for yourself -- they are sold to the same people who buy the ground beef under the name of "Beef trimmings" or "Beef bones" etc.

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

#237

Post by cimmanom »

newnewpdro wrote: post #13

PSA: your grocery store butcher will grind up a steak of your choosing for you at no cost, you only need to ask. I didn't know people bought pre-ground beef until moving out of my parents' home. Growing up, whenever we went shopping, my mother would start at the meat department, pick out a cheap steak, and ask the butcher to grind it up. We'd return for it later before heading to the cashier. I thought this was the s…

Assuming there’s a grocery store within a reasonable distance that has a real butcher counter.

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

#238

Post by jon-wood »

radicalbyte wrote: post #222
radicalbyte wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s because “don’t eat ground beef” isn’t a useful answer to the question “how do I best select ground beef”. There may be very good reasons to swap it out for chicken and veg, but this isn’t the place to bring it up.

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

#239

Post by WillPostForFood »

samatman wrote: post #160
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…

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?

Don’t you think you could tell the difference between a sirloin steak and skirt steak? Totally different shape, texture, level of fat, and flavor. But not sure one could tell ground beef (no regulation on what cuts are used: could be chuck, brisket, a mix) from the same ground beef with some LFTB mixed in.

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

#240

Post by prepend »

jannyfer wrote: post #144
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?

In Canada, you can go to a local grocery store or meat shop and choose meat cuts and have them grind them for you on the spot.

In the US too, all major grocery stores in my area you can ask them to grind up a chuck roast or any cut of meat and they will. It costs a little more depending on the price of the cut you select.
Post reply on HN