Ground Beef In Fast Food Now Contains "Pink Slime"

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[Junk Food]
Imagine what you've been eating the last few years (thanks to meat industry lobbyists) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."

This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage," and turned into "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips".

Thus saving THREE CENTS a pound off production costs. And making the company, Beef Products Inc., a fortune.

Bush's U.S.D.A. also allowed these "innovators" to get away with listing the ammonia as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also OKd the processing method -- and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general public -- strictly based on the company's claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.

Because the ammonia taste was so bad ("It was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia," said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. "I've never seen anything like it.") the company started using a less alkaline ammonia treatment, and now we know -- thanks to testing done for the school lunch program -- that the nasty stuff isn't even reliably killing the pathogens.


But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

In July, school lunch officials temporarily banned their hamburger makers from using meat from a Beef Products facility in Kansas because of salmonella - the third suspension in three years, records show. Yet the facility remained approved by the U.S.D.A. for other customers.

Presented by The Times with the school lunch test results, top [U.S.D.A.] department officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.

Details

 

Posted by Paul on 2010-01-05 06:12:03
Go vegetarian. It's that simple.
Beef Products, Inc.
Posted by permial on 2010-01-05 08:16:31
Shouldn't they be known as "Beef by Products, inc."?
Foos INC.
Posted by Kim Hunter on 2010-01-05 13:20:45
Saw the film on the plane. It touches on this practice and the company who "designed" this ammonia "meat" and the contaminated meat industry (especially cows)that are fed solely corn which they can't digest and causes antibiotic resistant e-coli in their bellies and in the meat. This could be stopped with just 4 days of grass feeding before slaughter... but nooo, "to expensive". The industry's bottom line is more important than human lives. $$$ talks. Stop buying cow meat.
solution
Posted by Meat_eater on 2010-01-26 12:29:41
i think they should be straped to their chairs, a hose inserted into their mouths and this pink slime should be pumped into them until it comes out of their anus holes
US Gov't is a Whore
Posted by Concerned Parent on 2010-12-31 19:52:30
This just goes to show what oru government thinks about the people it governs.

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