Pink slime has become a pejorative word for some ground beef mixes that have included taking beef trimmings, often times that are very close to the bone, and treated with ammonia or citric acid to create a leaner and more cost-effective component of some ground beef.
There has never been a question, in terms of food safety, yet due to the media and consumer fire storm that has erupted due to the psychological “yuck” factor, many retailers, both at the food service and supermarket levels, have retreated from using it, which according to the American Meat Institute, will require an additional 1.5 million cattle to be slaughtered to make up the difference in harvesting this otherwise wholesome protein from already slaughtered animals.
The process that they use to recover the additional lean meat is that they heat the meat on the bone, or trimmings, to approximately 100 degrees, spin them in a centrifugal spinner, and the lean beef easily separates from the fat. It is then treated with ammonium hydroxide or citric acid as an intervention to prevent bacterial problems from organisms such as Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7.
The important bottom line with this “pink slime” debacle, is that there is no food safety risk and, in fact, this is a safe product and uses as much of our resource of cattle as possible. There is no question that there definitely can be a “yuck” factor, especially when styled the way it has in both the media, and especially the social media.
Clearly, when you have the Secretary of Agriculture and the consumer advocate group, Center for Science, in the public interest on the same page and there has been no evidence of any illness, there is no food safety issue.
The USDA’s deputy secretary for food safety, Dr. Elizabeth Hagen, states that the real issue is transparency in labeling, which clearly can be easily corrected and, again, it is always the consumer who has the ultimate right to purchase or not for their consumption.
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