<story><title>What ABC called &quot;pink slime,&quot; USDA now says can be labeled &quot;ground beef&quot;</title><url>https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-reclassifed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdietrich</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;Why is this supposed to upset me?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the social class of who eats what.&lt;p&gt;Advanced meat recovery is the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating, allowing us to make use of almost every gram of edible meat on a carcass. If we&amp;#x27;re going to keep eating meat, we should celebrate advanced meat recovery in the same way that foodies celebrate unfashionable cuts or offal meat. We don&amp;#x27;t, because recovered meat is cheap and therefore has negative signalling value. The kind of people who buy grass-fed organic beef would never dream of knowingly eating &amp;quot;pink slime&amp;quot; or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that would otherwise go to waste.&lt;p&gt;Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean beef, because it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured beef, but it&amp;#x27;s widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily substituted by citric acid in this application. If you&amp;#x27;re concerned about health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to get more meat from every carcass.&lt;p&gt;(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Why is this supposed to upset me? If we&amp;#x27;re going to keep eating animals (and that sure is my plan), we shouldn&amp;#x27;t give ourselves the luxury of getting squicked out over using the whole animal.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re picky about what&amp;#x27;s in your ground beef, find a butcher you trust, or grind your own.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>burfog</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not honestly lean beef. If it were, it would be red.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s connective tissue, with a bit of lean beef mixed in. This has a different nutritional profile. There is less iron, and the amino acid proportions are different.&lt;p&gt;We could call it &amp;quot;pureed tendons, ligaments, defatted fat tissue, cartilage, lean beef, and ammonia or citric acid&amp;quot;. That is a long and unwieldy name. The common name, known to consumers, is pink slime.</text></comment>
<story><title>What ABC called &quot;pink slime,&quot; USDA now says can be labeled &quot;ground beef&quot;</title><url>https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-reclassifed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdietrich</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;Why is this supposed to upset me?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the social class of who eats what.&lt;p&gt;Advanced meat recovery is the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating, allowing us to make use of almost every gram of edible meat on a carcass. If we&amp;#x27;re going to keep eating meat, we should celebrate advanced meat recovery in the same way that foodies celebrate unfashionable cuts or offal meat. We don&amp;#x27;t, because recovered meat is cheap and therefore has negative signalling value. The kind of people who buy grass-fed organic beef would never dream of knowingly eating &amp;quot;pink slime&amp;quot; or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that would otherwise go to waste.&lt;p&gt;Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean beef, because it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured beef, but it&amp;#x27;s widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily substituted by citric acid in this application. If you&amp;#x27;re concerned about health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to get more meat from every carcass.&lt;p&gt;(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Why is this supposed to upset me? If we&amp;#x27;re going to keep eating animals (and that sure is my plan), we shouldn&amp;#x27;t give ourselves the luxury of getting squicked out over using the whole animal.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re picky about what&amp;#x27;s in your ground beef, find a butcher you trust, or grind your own.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deogeo</author><text>Is this what it has come to? Accusing of classism the people upset that food labeling regulations are getting slowly dismantled?&lt;p&gt;Please consider that &lt;i&gt;using&lt;/i&gt; the whole animal is a different thing to &lt;i&gt;labeling&lt;/i&gt; the resulting product however they want.</text></comment>