McDonald’s banned it, said Nick Carbone in Time.com, and the British government says it’s unfit for human consumption. Yet it could be in your fridge or your kid’s school lunch right now. We’re talking about “pink slime,” a gelatinous, ammonia-treated mix of low-grade beef scraps and connective tissues used as filler in some 70 percent of all supermarket ground beef. Several fast-food chains swore off the stuff earlier this year under pressure from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. But last week The Daily revealed that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was buying 7 million pounds of it for school lunches this year. Shockingly, consumers have no way of knowing whether cow parts “once useful only for dog food and cooking oil” are in their burgers, said KJ Dell’Antonia in NYTimes.com. The processed material isn’t listed as an ingredient, and no wonder: Who would buy a product labeled “ground beef with added connective tissues, fatty trimmings, and ammonia”?
“Pink slime” may sound gross, but there’s really nothing to fear here, said Joe Schwarcz in the Montreal Gazette. The industry calls the product “lean, finely textured beef trimmings,” and the ammonia it contains is merely a harmless way to kill off salmonella and E. coli pathogens. Given our current obsession with recycling, we should embrace any process that converts these scraps into edible lean beef. “Basically, more meat is produced” from fewer cows. And anything that helps bring down food costs is good news, said Alexandra Petri in WashingtonPost.com. Current regulations allow material gained by this process to make up 15 percent of hamburger meat. “Incorporate the treated meat, and you shave 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef.” If the slime is safe and makes more food available more cheaply to more people, “I’m not inclined to stand in its way.”
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