If little old ladies in some remote country were painstakingly scraping the last remnants of meat off bones with tiny knives the foodies of the world would be falling all over themselves about the humble appreciation and reverence they have for food.
Do it in Nebraska with a machine and it’s “pink slime”.
Meat’s meat and a man’s got to eat.
Why am I supposed to be in awe of the American Indians for using every part of an animal but disgusted by pink slime?
So as before here’s the dry rub.
By USDA standards it is beef. All agreed. And indeed that is what it is, chopped fine (into a slurry) and treated to kill the bacteria. What it aint is chopped ground round or ground sirloin but it aint labelled as such. If products with it in it need be labelled it won’t be with the media sensationalized phrase of “pink slime” but with what it more accurately is “boneless lean beef trimmings” and possibly further identified as “treated” - it may also be identified as lower fat.
Question is Odesio, why do you object to it being there if you accept it is no health risk over and beyond that you already accept with industrially mass-produced ground beef? Would the label of “with up to 5% treated boneless lean beef trimmings” make you less likely to purchase that package over another if it was leaner and cheaper than the other package of industrially mass-produced ground beef? Why?
Agreed, it’s beef.
I object because when I’m paying for 100% ground beef I expect it to be 100% ground beef. I’m a man who eats chicken nuggets which start out life in a form that’s indistinguishable to pink slime in my eyes. But, yes, I would purchase another company’s ground beef that didn’t include the 5% treated beef trimming because I prefer my ground beef to just have ground beef in it. It’s the same reason I don’t purchase whole chickens with a solution injected into it.
I think the big scare is because, spoken or unspoken, people are associating this with Mad Cow Disease.
These “mechanically separated” meat products refer, mainly, to the shreds of meat that are left on the bone after the major cuts are taken off. These are then sandblasted off the bones to get every scrap of usable protein. Other junk, like cartilage and sinew, might get included.
The big Mad Cow scare entailed getting some of the CNS nerve tissue, wherein the evil Mad Prions might have lurked. This included nerves running down the spinal column. We were told that meat cut too close to the bone could be contaminated. I think this really meant meat cut too close to the vertebrae, as opposed to meat cut close to other bones like the long limb bones or ribs.
Recovering the last shreds of obtainable meat by sandblasting the bones seemed scary because of that.
Recent case: 4000 pounds of beef were recalled in a Mad Cow scare because the meat processor company didn’t follow protocol in their procedures, to assure that no nerve tissue was included. Actually, that may or may not have been actually the problem; they simply didn’t document their procedures carefully enough. And there was no evidence at all that any of the cattle actually had Mad Cow Disease.
Cite: 4,000 pounds of rib-eyes, other beef recalled; mad cow disease a concern, Saundra Young, CNN, June 13, 2014:
Doesn’t sound too bad- outside of the Red 40, it’s pretty much the ingredient list for a standard industrially produced sausage. Sodium Erythorbate is merely an antioxidant that modifies the nitrite to nitric oxide breakdown to keep the meat a nice pink color. It’s probably helpful for maintaining freshness.
For some gross ingredients, the Penrose Firecracker sausages had “Beef Lips” as their second ingredient. Why they didn’t just lump them under “Beef” as the first ingredient is beyond me.
Odesio, you’re paying for 100% ground beef and that’s what you’re getting. I don’t know why you would expect it would be “prime cuts”: If your ground beef is made from prime cuts, then it’s darned well going to say so on the package, and you’re going to pay prime prices for it. If they don’t say it’s a prime cut, then it’s not. You know what you’re getting. They don’t need to say “This is made from the cheap cuts”, because the price tag already says that.
Huh?
Pink slime isn’t ground beef, though. It is not ground when it is made, and it’s not solid enough to be ground after being made. Furthermore, it’s not a cut of beef, either, whether cheap orotherwise. It’s a completely different process for getting meat.
And the whole reason everyone was worried about it is that it is potentially less safe than other forms of beef. I don’t know if this has been resolved or not, but they had to treat it with some chemicals at higher doses that some people felt were unsafe.
I mean, I’ll wind up eating it, too. But I’m not going to call it something it isn’t. It isn’t ground beef, and it isn’t even a cheap cut of meat. It’s a processed meat paste. There is still a difference between ground beef made from cheap cuts and ground beef made from cheap cuts and a meat paste.
The only reason I’ll care is if it starts tasting different. And, even then, I’ll still buy the cheap stuff because I don’t make a lot of money.
I think the term you’re looking for is “primal cuts,” not “prime,” which means something different.
While I don’t really care much at all about the “pink slime” hoopla, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that anything that contains mechanically separated beef and bits of cartilage that are processed in a certain way to be labeled as such. I get pure “ground beef” from my local butcher (remember, only about 70% of “ground beef” contains this type of beef product). There is nothing on the packaging that states it is not treated with this processed beef. I wouldn’t know, other than I actually can see them grinding the beef trimmings there.
One of the problems we’re having with food these days isn’t exactly because industrialized food products are in and of themselves harmful.
It’s because we don’t actually know what’s in our food, so we aren’t able to make rational decisions.
In the 1990s, there was a wave of “fat free” food. But it didn’t help anyone get healthier because it was just replacing fat calories with a giant heap of sugar calories.
High-fructose corn syrup isn’t a problem because there’s something intrinsically wrong with it. It’s just sugar, just like what comes in fruit. The problem is that it’s extremely densely packed with sugar calories and we aren’t aware that it’s in everything.
We don’t know that our McDonald’s ice cream sundaes are mostly made from hazelnuts—densely caloric—except for the nuts, which are made from cellulose, i.e., cardboard.
We don’t know that anything with blueberries—except for actual fresh, raw blueberries—is actually just blueberry-flavored candy. It’s all corn syrup!
These things are problematic not because they are intrinsically “bad for you” (cellulose is undigestible, so it just goes through you, I suppose), but because without knowing what we are eating, our choices are meaningless.
We go to Applebee’s and decide to make a “healthy” option and pick the grilled chicken breast—which has been pumped with butter, half-cooked, frozen, and shipped to the restaurant. Even things that look like they’re supposed to be fresh food aren’t.
And they’ve enlisted the perfume industry to make anything taste like anything. Our senses are no longer useful in helping us figure out what’s supposed to be fresh and what isn’t.
My company provides a ton of free snacks. There’s a row of half a dozen different kinds of chips and crisps and stuff. And then another row of them, marked “Healthy Choices.” That’s so misleading. Ultimately, bag of Sun Chips is not all that good for you compared to a bag of Lay’s.
pulykamell there are some reasonable reasons to prefer meats ground on site over the Big Food Inc industrially mass produced products (even though the industry has improved safety to such a degree that both poultry and leafy greens now are bigger food poisoning culprits). But most of what is used in restaurants and as prepackaged goods in grocery stores are industrially produced. Given that the issue is how can they produce the healthiest product most efficiently?
The estimate is that 25% of the actual meat on a beef carcass is wasted, attached to (and streaked into) the fat and attached to the bones and tendons cut off from higher end cuts.
This process allows that high quality protein to be eaten instead of wasted. It allows for that much more food to be effectively produced from each cow’s life, from the feed that went into growing that cow, and out of the greenhouse gases costs associated with the life of that cow. Industrially mass produced ground beef containing this product is as safe, if not safer, than industrially mass produced ground beef without it, and I have never heard that anyone can tell a blinded taste test difference between them.
So if it is as safe or safer, tastes the same as any other cheap industrially mass produced ground beef, as lean or leaner, nutritionally the same or better then I am not sure that labelling need be required. Maybe they should label it and market it based on its green cred though?
I am all for using all edible bits of the animal. I eat pink slime food regularly. It’s still something I’d like to know when making decisions on purchases. Depending on what I’m eating, I might buy the generic pink slime beef, I might buy ground chuck, or I may buy something like boneless short ribs and grind it myself. I’d just think it’s fair to know.
And part of it is it seems a bit inconsistent to me. What are mechanically separated chicken and such listed on ingredient labels, but not for ground beef? As a consumer, I would have expected similar labeling laws with beef as a raw product.
I made an error and wrote prime cut when I should have written primal cut. My apologies for the confusion and my thanks to pulykamell for pointing out my error.
A New York strip and a pound of ground chuck are both beef products. One is ground beef while the other is not but they’re both beef. Likewise, a pound of pink slime is just as much a beef product as is a pound of ground round it’s just that one is ground beef and the other is not. I hope that clears up any confusion you might have.
It would be required if mechanically separated beef, as “mechanically separated” is definedby the USDA, was allowed for human consumption. It isn’t and this process is not considered that. For poultry
Mechanically separated meat is similarly defined as
But
OTOH beef derived from advanced meat/bone separation machinery
As clear as mud. Chuck is not NY Strip; finely textured beef trimmings is beef.
If you buy something labelled as “beef” you are entitled to it being beef. You are getting that. If you want NY Strip you buy NY Strip and that is what you are entitled to get; if you want ground chuck you buy ground chuck. You just want anything that can be called beef then you buy generic “ground beef” … or is your (ehem) beef merely the fact that it is finely textured by a means other than a grinder? Would you accept it if it was, as wiki claims it is, “finely ground” before it was pressed and frozen? Or ground before placed in the heated centrifuge?
Ground beef is a piece of beef put through a grinder. There is no expectation that it contains a slurry or paste.
I’m a bit of a food snob and prefer not to eat pink slime - or any meat that is not pasture-raised. I have a lot of food-related health issues and allergies, and I’ve learned to be careful about what goes into my food, and even the cleaning products I use can cause problems.
But if I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place, or am a guest being offered a meal, I smile and say thank you and eat what is in front of me.