On a Budget? Pink Slime is Back to Save You Money!Daisy Luther It was so bad that one company, Beef Products Inc., was forced to close several plants and file for bankruptcy after the backlash in 2012. Incidentally, BPI filed a 1.2 billion dollar lawsuit is pending against ABC for breaking the story that more than 70% of grocery store ground beef contained pink slime. Well, in response to rising meat costs, its back. (Did it ever actually leave?) BPI will be manufacturing the slaughterhouse remnant product at a new plant in Kansas, and Cargill Inc. is also producing the slime. Of course, neither company is marketing the product under the name pink slime. BPI calls it lean finely textured beef (LFTB) and Cargill calls it finely textured beef. That makes it sound almost fancy, doesnt it? The purpose of this is to continue to charge customers the same price, but to stretch the meat with the LFTB in order to lower costs for the company selling the meat. The only problem is, you are consuming byproducts that you would never ordinarily consume, and those byproducts are treated with multiple chemicals. None of this information is included on your label. In fact, according to the USDA, labels can proudly proclaim 95% Lean Ground Beef when this product is included, and people mistakenly believe they are purchasing a high quality meat. (Keep in mind this is the same USDA with an inspector who allowed a slaughterhouse to sell meat from cows with cancer, while falsely condemning healthy beef and ripping off the farmers to the benefit of the slaughterhouse.) Sales of Finely Textured Beef Are Up An exec from Cargill said that their sales of finely textured beef recently have risen about threefold from their lowest point. The USDA (and you know how trustworthy they are) says that LFTB is really not that bad. In fact, its so innocuous that it doesnt even have to be included on the label. Sois FTB really that bad? Not according to Cargill: A Cargill representative told Yahoo that the companys finely textured beef, available since 1993, is 100% pure beef and is usually added to ground beef to increase the percentage of muscle protein to fat. The company describes the process of making this product as similar to separating milk from cream, those small pieces of beef are separated from the fat. The fat that has been separated is turned into tallow [a form of rendered fat]. It is not added back to the ground beef. (source) Except, of course, when I separate milk from cream, I dont treat the milk with ammonium hydroxide gas. Nor do I include rejected fat, sinew, and bloody effluvia from a slaughterhouse. Dont worry. It wont kill you with e coli, because its treated for your safetywith ammonium hydroxide gas and citric acid. (Dont forget that citric acid is actually derived from genetically modified black mold!) And if you are silly enough to worry about eating ammonia and black mold, another trustworthy federal agency, the FDA, has your back there too. How can you avoid pink slime? If you, for some strange reason, would like to omitrejected fat, sinew, and bloody effluvia from your familys diet, here are a few tips: How do you avoid eating meat byproducts? Do the attitudes of the USDA and FDA about this matter concern you? Resources: Find local food at Eat Local Grown You can visit the selfnews Post Pink Slime archive HERE. Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor who lives in a small village in the Pacific Northwestern area of the United States. She is the author ofThe Pantry Primer: How to Build a One Year Food Supply in Three Months.On her website, The Organic Prepper,Daisy writes about healthy prepping, homesteading adventures, and the pursuit of liberty and food freedom. Daisy is a co-founder of the website Nutritional Anarchy, where this first appeared, which focuses on resistance through food self-sufficiency. Daisys articles are widely republished throughout alternative media.You can follow her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca 