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

241–250 of 320 posts

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

#241

Post by coldtea »

kbutler wrote: post #146
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…

> (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. Well, there goes cooked food.

Or you know, you can always apply the "principle of charity" to a discussion, instead of pedantry.

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

#243

Post by gdubs »

This conversation shows that plenty of people are uncomfortable with a food process like this. Many of you point out that food is complex, and people are irrational to be squeamish about this particular process.

But how about this? Maybe people wouldn’t eat so much meat if they were more aware of the process behind it? And maybe, given how detrimental meat production had been to the environment, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

So, rather than protecting people by hiding the truth behind the processes that are behind the food they eat, we should be more transparent.

If that means we go back to small farms, local butcheries — something people have been comfortable with for centuries — it would of course raise the cost of meat. But If we hope to address climate change, that absolutely needs to happen.

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

#244

Post by brownbat »

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…

Really appreciate the calm, thoughtful, and informed devil's advocate perspective, we need more of that for meaningful discussions.

> We really need to be talking about the use of antibiotics as a growth promoter

I don't have fully formed views on this so I'm curious...

Are your concerns about antibiotics based on a fear of reduced effectiveness of human medicines? A cursory search makes it look like significant chunk of animal antibiotics are ionophores, which are entirely different from what's used in human medicine... maybe you have a different concern?

Are you ok with ionophores? Or if not, how do you propose limiting the impact of coccidiosis, which seems widely prevalent in poultry and leads to massive gut damage and animal suffering if not treated prophylactically?

Your point on 'pink slime' seems to be that once you dig beyond the headlines, food regulation and safety issues are far more complicated than the bumper stickers.

Not so with animal antibiotics? Or is your concern with those similarly more nuanced than most of the popular complaints?

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

#245

Post by RHSeeger »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #203
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…

> sensationally revealing a "shocking secret" that is neither shocking nor secret In which case, what's the problem simply labelling meat that has been through this complex mechanical and chemical process? Let consumers choose from a position of awareness. Allowing it to all be labelled the same as meat that has simply been through a mincer is industry burying it for easier profit. Thankfully the EU chose to ban thes…

Lean in US supermarkets tends to be, as you said, 10 or sometimes even 5%. I buy 9% because I've found lower than that impacts the taste too much.

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

#246

Post by RHSeeger »

dmurray wrote: post #212
burfog wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using "ground" to mean something that isn't actually run through a grinder, and "ground beef" to mean something the is created differently than what people have called "ground beef" is intentionally misleading. I honestly can't even imagine how anyone can see it any other way; it's baffling to me.

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

#247

Post by phyzome »

rubyfan wrote: post #226

Gross. I can’t wait for Impossible Burger to hit the grocery store.

I tried some the other day. It tasted precisely like a shitty fast-food burger. Which is to say... ground meat with "lean finely textured beef" mixed in.

Impossible Burger tastes the same as that product, and is made via just as industrial a process, so don't switch on those accounts.

You want to stop eating meat? That's a perfectly fine reason! But switching because of LFTB would be pretty silly.

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

#248

Post by dTal »

jdietrich wrote: post #105
deogeo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this what it has come to? Accusing of classism the people upset that food labeling regulations are getting slowly dismantled? Please consider that using the whole animal is a different thing to labeling the resulting product however they want.

A lot of people decided that LFTB was horrible stuff, based on no real evidence other than the fact that it's cheap. We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef. I'm not convinced that LFTB is sufficiently different to conventional minced beef to warrant specific labelling; we don't expect every ingredient to come with a…

What feels wrong is that "fewer calories, less fat and more fibre" doesn't more nutritious to me - it sounds like cardboard. There's a lot more to nutrition than the (harmful) "fat = bad" meme. In the general case, home-cooked food, made from raw vegetables etc, definitely isn't less healthy than processed food.

Nor do I understand the classism argument - cooking food from raw is enormously cheaper. Maybe it's different in America, but in the UK £10 worth of ready meals will feed you for a few meals, while £10 worth of judiciously selected ingredients will feed you for a week.

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

#249

Post by cageface »

keymone wrote: post #208
cageface wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For treating epileptics yes, not as a diet recommended for general use. https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps...

yeah, it wasn't recommended because for treating epilepsy they were using a powdered meal replacement (like soylent) and were missing some essential ingredients like phosphorus. it's absolutely a diet that can work for anybody, it does require a fair amount of reading though.

I know. I'm not debating the merits of it, I'm just saying it wasn't a popular diet for the average Joe until recently.

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

#250

Post by war1025 »

notyourday wrote: post #233
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. 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…

I believe the standard for restaurant food is that the food itself should be 1/3 of the purchase price. Which looks to be right on target, since I think a burrito at least around here is usually about $7.50
Post reply on HN