According to NPR, “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB), or “boneless lean beef trimmings” (BLBT), or “pink slime” has hit the comeback trail in the wake of higher beef prices. There are many people who object strongly to its use, or even the possibility of its use,
Me, I eat hot dogs and those videos had me thinking pink slime looked familiar. You know the saying about laws and sausages, and the stuff seems very like bologna without the fillers, spices, and 30% fat. In other words, food, but I even like textured vegetable protein, which is about as far from natural soy beans as you can get without having something Henry Ford would build a car from. Pink slime looks to me like a fine product for making lean taco filling or little chunks of meat for canned spaghetti sauce, but what say you?
I don’t give a shit. I eat fairly healthy in general but I will eat just about anything if the mood strikes. I have been in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. I am under no delusion that any meat just magically shows up in nice little packages. One of my favorite treats are Tijuana Mama pickled sausages that are sold in gas stations all over the country apparently only for my benefit because I have never seen anyone else buy one.
The ingredients give the finger to the entire natural foods movement and I love them for it:
“Mechanically Separated Chicken, Pork, Flavoring, Soy Protein Concentrate, Salt, Corn Syrup Solids, Less than 2% of: Beef, Paprika, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Red 40. Pickled in Vinegar, Water, Salt, Red 40.”
People who object to “pink slime” should also, to be consistent, avoid jello, soup broth, and yes, sausage because all it is, is just another type of food product and those other items pretty much use the same bits. If you’ve ever made soup broth from bones you’ve essentially done the same thing, it’s take the meaty bits off bones and trimmings. “Boneless lean beef trimming” is actually a very accurate and descriptive name for the stuff, much more so than “pink slime”.
Seriously, next thing people will panic after discovering that milk comes from cow udders.
I always wanted to try scrapple. It sounds like Burger King’s breakfast sausage, which has a strong hint of pork liver. I’ve begun to save up the 1.0x1.5mm bone chunks I’ve been pulling out of my daily Sausage Biscuit With Cheese (only a buck!). I might send them to BK in hopes that they send me a gift card because really, that’s awfully big and if I had any molars that meshed left I might bust one.
For those unfamiliar with head cheese, the recipe begins, “Take the head of one dead pig.” Part of the problem is that few people these days cooked with their grandmothers, or allowing for most people being younger than I, great-great-grandmothers.
FTR, I hoped for more controversy. Instead, I’m getting hungry. Shows how boringly accepting the SDMB is.
Head cheese. It’s tasty. And nutritious.
Also blood/black sausage (yum), white sausage (definitely yum especially with raisins) and menudo.
I was a farm kid (we often butchered our own meat) and lived in other countries growing up so there isn’t much I won’t at least try. Well, dog meat. Just no. I’m against eating carnivores, generally.
When McDonalds was accused of putting worms into their hamburgers The owner said they cost too much to consider doing so at $6.00 a pound instead of $1.00 a pound for beef, si it is for certain that it was considered or how would he have known the price?
I live in the Dominican Republic and last week was in a haitian village and a woman was sitting on a rock with the head of a hog on her lap. I watched as she sliced off the ears and shaved the whiskers off with her knife. I found it time to move on before seeing what came next.
Indifferent to maybe positive with it being there. Nutritionally and food safety-wise not any reason to believe it is any different than any other industrially mass produced ground meat. If anything a bit safer since it is pasteurized and the rest of the vat aint. Plus better to let as little of the animal go to waste as possible in my book, including from a CO2 perspective. That said people who care should be able to know. And that said they should not be so easily manipulated by media fear mongering.
So same as before. Industrially mass-produced beef is not a risk free food with or without this added to it.
Of course the idea of using insect derived protein additives appeals to me too so I may not be a typical data point.
I for one never objected to pink slime on the basis that I believed it posed a danger to my health. I only object to it’s use in the ground beef I purchase at the supermarket. When the label says 100% ground beef I expect nothing to be in there except ground beef. And, yes, I understand that pink slime is apparently an acceptable form of ground beef according to the USDA I just don’t consider it acceptable. I’ve got no other objection to its use though.
Seriously, if you want pure, hormone- and antibiotic-free sustainably-raised* meat, you have to raise and kill it yourself, or buy it from a small operation that is committed to and transparent about their meat production.
*This goes for just about any food, including dairy and meat as well as fruits and vegetables, and just about anything in fact that you buy in the supermarket.
I’m not one of those pure food hippies. It’s just that I honestly expected ground beef to essentially be nothing more than certain cuts of meat ground up and packaged. i.e. I expect the ground beef sold in a supermarket to be the same thing I’d have at home if I bought a prime piece of meat and ground it myself. I never expected it to be ground beef plus cartilage, connective tissue, and sinew that had been stuck in a centrifuge and heated to 100 degrees.
I don’t remember mentioning anything about hormones or antibiotics.
If I recall correctly, people were surprised because it was being used in a product that we ordinarily think of as being a raw ingredient, not as highly processed.
Oh, OK. I apparently assumed incorrectly that people today understood where meat came from. I was wrong. Carry on pretending that meat is not actually meat, then.
Really? Thinking that ground beef is a part of a cow that has been washed, chopped up, and then wrapped and not expecting the addition of some kind of highly processed sludge or slurry such as that used to make hot dogs is thinking that meat isn’t meat?
