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

291–300 of 320 posts

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

#291

Post by adrr »

KAMSPioneer wrote: post #286
adrr wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety of the disinfectant isn't the issue. It's the care of the food in the process. Ground beef processing needs to be handled with care to prevent it from being contaminated with feces to prevent Ecoli H157 outbreaks. I'd rather my food receive greater care in handling and preventing fecal contamination then just blanket disinfecting it.

I understand the concern wrt E. Coli (I assume you were referring to O157:H7 -- the number after the O refers to the antigen produced by the lipopolysaccharide layer, and H refers to the flaggelar antigen, so H157 is likely an error). Also, the USDA has categorized other E. Coli stains as adulterants: O26, O131, O145, O45, O111, O121. Also, Salmonella has a tendency to grow in ground production areas and is a concern…

Only the US puts warnings both at butchers and on packages for meat products. It’s has to do our prevalence of food borne diseases caused by our lax regulation and food handling standards. Europe doesn’t have the large meat borne ecoli outbreaks like the US. They’re outbreaks are through vegetables. You can eat raw hamburger(beef tartar) with little risk of getting sick in Europe. You be foolish to grab ground beef at a US supermarket and it eat it raw.

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

#292

Post by nate_meurer »

nate_meurer wrote: post #193
an_opabinia wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 No, they are the same chemical for the purposes of this discussion. Any form of ammonia you eat -- whether ammonium bicarbonate or ammonium sulfate in bread, or ammonia residues in meat -- will be found as ammonium hydroxide in your blood. It's the same stuff. A…

Edit to my comment above:

My numbers in that comment are a bit off. I looked up my last blood test, and my UUN number was close to 20 g/day. This means that every day my body is producing two hundred times more ammonia than what you'd get eating a big pile of pink slime.

I'm taking pains in this thread to point out that I'm vegetarian, and even aside from that, I'd rather eat out of the trash than make LFTB a regular part of my diet. But that's not because of some imaginary risk from trace ammonia.

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

#293

Post by dragonwriter »

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?

> So if I want to eat nice meat cuts ground up, without getting slime, what do I do?

(1) buy a meat grinder, or

(2) go to a butcher (often even a grocery store butcher) that lets you select a cut and have it ground.

That's true even without the slime issue, because “ground beef” isn't coming from “nice cuts” with Abby particular consistency.

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

#294

Post by shawnz »

Spivak wrote: post #284
shawnz wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the argument is more that consumers have a very specific idea about what constitutes ground beef: a few specific cuts of beef put through a meat grinder. Full stop. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using the whole cow so to speak -- people love chicken nuggets and hot dogs -- but you should at least be upfront about the difference. If I tried to pass off a tub of 'pink slime' as ground beef in a kitchen…

But the key is that the same cuts are used for this product. They're just separated from the fat more efficiently. It's not a different cut, it's just recovered in a different way. They could then choose to grind it afterward or not, but either way that is something which just affects the final shape/texture of the product and I don't think the mechanics of how it is shaped is what is really bothering people about BPI's product.

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

#295

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

Pink slime is definitely beef, but it's not ground.

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

#296

Post by notyourday »

jdietrich wrote: post #281
notyourday wrote: post #233

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. 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…

Where did the wheat come from? What chemicals and microbes were in the soil and water that the wheat grew in? What substances have been intentionally added to the soil and water? What are the genetic traits of that wheat and how have they been altered? What was added or removed from the wheat when it was processed into flour? What contamination might have happened during the journey from field to plate? How was the c…

So from "organic burrito" being complicated we are down to single ingredient being complicated.

USDA certified 100% organic flour is super simple. It pretty much requires that every single step in a process take only USDA certified 100% organic inputs.

The really funny part is that the parent's comment sound like it was written by the old food giants whose lunch was being eaten by the organic food companies -- the ones that the old giants are buying for hundreds of million dollars because they can't figure out that the fewer ingredients there are and the fewer processes there are the fewer problems there would be.

Food is like code. The fewer lines of code, the fewer bugs. The fewer libraries, the fewer bugs.

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

#297

Post by KAMSPioneer »

adrr wrote: post #291
KAMSPioneer wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the concern wrt E. Coli (I assume you were referring to O157:H7 -- the number after the O refers to the antigen produced by the lipopolysaccharide layer, and H refers to the flaggelar antigen, so H157 is likely an error). Also, the USDA has categorized other E. Coli stains as adulterants: O26, O131, O145, O45, O111, O121. Also, Salmonella has a tendency to grow in ground production areas and is a concern…

Only the US puts warnings both at butchers and on packages for meat products. It’s has to do our prevalence of food borne diseases caused by our lax regulation and food handling standards. Europe doesn’t have the large meat borne ecoli outbreaks like the US. They’re outbreaks are through vegetables. You can eat raw hamburger(beef tartar) with little risk of getting sick in Europe. You be foolish to grab ground beef a…

> Europe doesn’t have the large meat borne ecoli outbreaks like the US. They’re outbreaks are through vegetables. You can eat raw hamburger(beef tartar) with little risk of getting sick in Europe.

Do you have any solid data or can you cite any analysis of per-capita STEC infections, categorized by infection vector, for the US and EU?

Also, steak tartare is made of steak, not trim. I'm not convinced that it makes for a valid comparison.

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

#298

Post by notyourday »

cwyers wrote: post #276
notyourday wrote: post #233

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. 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…

> 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 What's in the flour? Is it bleached? Treated with a maturing agent? (Most AP flour in the US has been treated with both.)…

The person to whom I replied was talking about "organic burrito" which is either USDA certified 100% organic or an irrelevant label. If it is USDA certified 100% organic it has strict rules for every component that goes into it.

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

#299

Post by lurquer »

"Whipped Beef" sounds tastier. That's what I'd call it... or maybe "Creamed Beef" or "Beef Pudding".

With a good food photographer, I'm sure you could make a cup of 'pink slime' look tasty.

Indeed, look at a typical close-up photo of Jello-Pudding... creamy, silky, scrumptious. That it's made out of horse hooves doesn't even cross one's mind.

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

#300

Post by pvaldes »

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…

> 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.

o with one or two 2D barcodes

Post reply on HN