Yesterday I went to a soul food restaurant to get some
meatloaf. You can still get meat loaf at soul food joints, and I had a hankering for down home comfort food.
Happily quaffing down some southern sweet tea and chomping
away on a good slice of meatloaf, I suddenly thought—OH S__T....PINK SLIME![i]
 |
| Pink Slime |
That
was it for the meatloaf. My comfort in
the comfort food fell off the cliff. I
finished off my collard greens. The
meatloaf went into a doggie box. Dogs
don’t know pink slime from Alpo.[ii]
Pink slime has been in the news lately. Three factories that
made only pink slime recently closed. All the workers were laid off.[iii]
Another case of “job-killing regulations”?
Pink slime is
approved by the US Department of Agriculture. 70% of ground beef contains pink slime,
according to ABC news.[iv] It is even approved for your kids’ school
lunches by the National School Lunch Program. (Next year schools can choose
to refuse meat containing pink slime, but, for now, the regulation-crazy federal
government says: no problem.)
The factories that went under were not closed by any
regulatory authority for violating any food safety rules. What closed the
factories and killed the jobs was a sudden and precipitous loss of faith by the
American public in hamburger meat.
When the word began to get out through the internet and news
media that hamburger meat, especially lean, low-fat hamburger meat, contained
pink slime, the bottom began to drop out of the market for ground beef. Even McDonalds
dropped pink slime.
To keep their market from imploding, ground beef processors
stopped adding in the pink slime and—Bingo—no more market for the slime.
Five Republican governors toured a pink slime factory and proclaimed: "Dude, It's Beef!" Willard Mitt Romney continued his tirades about Obama’s
“job-killing regulations.”
But, pardon me Governor, what killed the jobs in this case, and in many others, was
not regulations. Pink slime is so unregulated that beef processors don't even have to mention it on ground beef package labels (if its less than 15% of the total product).
What
killed this business was a job-killing loss of trust by the American public. People don't like surprises in their food. If you don't believe me, check out this You tube video.
The American food supply system is under-regulated
to the point of being almost unregulated. The ammonia in pink slime is “harmless,”
says the industry, and no regulator has the guts to cast any doubt on that
assertion. Possible brain damage? Why worry?[v]
Consumption of processed food depends on trust. The consumer has to trust that large
multinational food-processing companies owned by billionaires are working to keep food safe and not
worrying too much about making bigger profits.
Does the American consumer know what a colossal joke that
is?
Our food-supply system from beginning to end is entirely dependent on
a gullible public. Regulatory authorities are either nonexistent or have
been totally neutered by the food industry. The essential public trust can evaporate in a nanosecond
when people start to learn what is really in their food.
The chicken industry is a good example. This is an industry
dominated by a few huge international corporations. The farmers raising the
chickens are basically no more than indentured servants who can only do what
they are told. If they don’t comply--
out of business. They are not even allowed to know what is in the feed that
they feed the chickens. If they don’t
know, you and I sure aren’t going to know either. Mother Jones among others has
been working on exposing
this issue.
Every time you eat a piece of chicken, you are trusting
Perdue or Tyson Food or another giant corporation to put your health ahead of
their bottom line.
Hamburger or chicken tonight?
Either way, maybe you can console yourself that, whatever unlabeled noxious pink slime you are eating, at least no job-killing over-regulating federal bureaucrat was involved.
Either way, maybe you can console yourself that, whatever unlabeled noxious pink slime you are eating, at least no job-killing over-regulating federal bureaucrat was involved.
This is a certified organic free-range blog.
[i] Pink slime comes consists of waste products of a slaughtered cow. The
stuff is so heavily contaminated with bacteria that it has to be burned,
made into for fertilizer, dumped in landfills, or used for dog food. Recently, a
company called Beef Products, Inc. started putting the waste through a centrifuge,
compressing the ingredients, spraying them with ammonia gas to kill the pathogens, and flash freezing it.
Presto, a new filler for ground beef. Ground beef can contain up to 15% pink
slime without any label being required. The ammonia is excluded from the
labeling process because it is considered a processing agent and not an
ingredient. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime).
[ii] The use of pink slime in dog food declined when dog owners discovered it
and started refusing to buy dog food with pink slime it in. (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/is-it-wrong-to-feed-pink-slime-to-our-children-in-school-lunches/255320/)
[v] Ammonia is capable of crossing the blood brain barrier. Elevated levels
of ammonia can lead to impaired memory, shortened attention span, sleep
disturbances, ataxia, seizures and coma. Untroubled by that inconvenient fact,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), always an ally of the American beef
industry, has deemed the ammonia-treated waste product Lean Finely Textured
Beef (LBTB), or pink slime, as “safe.”
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