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The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest defamation set

• sp332 8y ago
  I was super disappointed with Jamie Oliver's protest video against pink slime. He threw animal bits into a blender or something, and then put the result into a washing machine with a bunch of ammonia. I like the guy in general but this was awful.
  • wolco 8y ago
    That's the process. Bits of meat with ammonia going around in circles.
    • sp332 8y ago
      No. They spray a mist of ammonia over the meat to disinfect it. It's not an ingredient.
      • chii 8y ago
        But does the end product contain ammonia? If it does, then it's an ingredient.
        • sjwright 8y ago
          If you let your steak dry before cooking, do you list the airborne dust and bacteria as ingredients?
          • SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
            The whole issue here isn’t the outside of the meat. The outside is supposed to have bacteria, and be cooked off. It’s that re-shaped meat is done with meat product that is made up of a lot of outside surface (the part that has all the bacteria) now being smashed to the inside of the product where it won’t get hot enough to kill. The inside of beef is quite clean, that’s why it’s safe to eat rare. The inside of reshaped meat isn’t safe to eat rare. But consumers don’t know the difference.
            • wutbrodo 8y ago
              I'd be very surprised at someone knowing that beef doesn't need to be cooked internally to as high a temperature _without_ knowing that this isn't true of ground beef. I'm not much of a cook, and have even less exposure to Western cooking, and that's one of the basics you come across when you first started handling meat.
              • SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
                Yes, I agree it’s common knowledge that steak and burger have different cooking requirements. The issue is if you THINK you have a nice solid real steak with clean insides, but ACTUALLY have a few steak pieces glued together with ground meat purée. You can’t tell by looking at it. Probably doesn’t taste any different. And the customer is never informed.
                • wutbrodo 8y ago
                  I might have misunderstood what we were talking about here: I thought the context was ground beef. I agree that I probably wouldn't assume that my steak wasn't reconstituted.
            • sp332 8y ago
              Isn't that problem shared by all ground beef?
              • 8y ago
        • cc439 8y ago
          Literally every foodstuff will be exposed to bleach and or ammonia due to the washdown procedure in every food processing plant. It may not be present in the same quantities as a product directly treated by such disinfectants but it's still there.
          • wolco 8y ago
            No not at all. A handful of companies in a few products use ammonia. Cheese, chocolate and baked goods. For baked goods they claim it evaporates. Cheap cheeses use it to speed up growth. Some foods breakdown into ammonia so our bodies can handle it but constant higher levels can cause illness as it overwhelms the body.
            • nate_meurer 8y ago
              Some foods? You mean, like, literally all digestible proteins? > but constant higher levels can cause illness as it overwhelms the body. Note that this has nothing to do with the tiny residual levels of ammonia in bread, cheese (both cheap and expensive), and meat products of all kinds. Your body produces and excretes an order of magnitude more ammonia than what you eat directly from food, and will easily do far more than that if you're athletic or eat a lot of extra protein.
              • wolco 8y ago
                The bacteria in your body produce waste ammonia, hydrogen, methaine. Your body using the detoxication channels available to remove them. If the body is unable to you get sick. Throwing in more ammonia will cause more stress on these pathways. Bodies can only handle so much we try to counteract these with things to detoxify like rest, exercise, other foods, etc. Eat pink slime through your 20s might be okay the older you get the less your body will be able to handle pink slime for breakfast.
                • nate_meurer 8y ago
                  I don't mean to insult you, so let me apologize if this sounds mean, but I can tell you're completely unfamiliar with basic human physiology. What you're saying makes no sense. Ammonia is your body's way of getting rid of nitrogen, which comes from dietary protein. In general, an adult's body must dispose of as much nitrogen as they consume. This makes sense if you think about it, because humans don't grow forever. You may gain or lose lean mass for periods of time, but in general, nitrogen excretion equals nitrogen intake. The more protein you eat, the more ammonia your body makes, and your body is designed to efficiently process and eliminate large amounts of ammonia, mostly via conversion to urea and renal filtering. So think about this logically for a moment. Think about how much protein you eat every day. In effect, all of the nitrogen in that protein (an equal amount of nitrogen, rather) is converted to ammonia inside your body. You'll see exactly how much whenever you have your blood tested, in your UUN (Urine Urea Nitrogen) number. My last UUN was about 20 g/day. Healthy athletes commonly excrete up to 40 or 50 grams of nitrogen per day, which means their bodies can safely produce upward of 50 grams of ammonia every day (molar mass ratio of nitrogen to ammonia is about 0.82). This is perfectly normal and sustainable for your entire life. Renal efficiency declines slowly after middle age, but reasonably high-protein diets are harmless and in many ways beneficial even for elderly people. Does this make sense? You're worried about eating, say, a hundred milligrams of extra ammonia in your food, while your body is naturally and safely producing hundreds of times more than that every day. Do you see how silly that sounds? EDIT: As I pointed out in another comment, I'm a vegetarian, and I reflexively consider LFTB to be approximately equivalent to roadkill. I think there are legitimate risks in mislabeling LFTB, but the trace ammonia content is not one of them.
        • zdragnar 8y ago
          Ever eat bean sprouts? Those are sanitized with ammonia or bleach. They need moist, warm environments to sprout, and are a breeding ground for listeria.
• tantalor 8y ago
  > mostly fake news Except people generally were rightfully surprised to learn the basic product they thought they understood contained some modern industrial cost-saving additive. If that's not news, I don't know what is. > defamation settlement There's no evidence ABC were acting with malice or their story was untrue. A settlement just means they wanted out of the argument.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest defamation settlement in the history of the United States. I'd say this "beef" is fake meat -- whether some court agrees or not (that depends on who has the best lawyers and deeper pockets, not on who has the best food). I'd be OK with companies being allowed to sell all kinds of crap as foodstuff, if they didn't highjack on existing food labels as it's the regular beef people know to fool consumers and paint a picture.
  • doctorpangloss 8y ago
    People have had so much trouble getting over words we use to describe food. Clearly, when a normal person says "real" or "natural" or "doesn't have chemicals", they mean foods that are (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. This seems reasonable to me! That's why it's okay to eat beef that someone used a machine to separate, but it's not okay to eat beef treated with ammonia. Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia! This is reminiscent of the MSG scare. It was never about MSG as an underlying ingredient or racism (everyone loves Chinese food). As Wikipedia says, it's been a component of flavors "as early as 5,500 BCE." What changed is that it was manufactured industrially with "hydrolysis of vegetable proteins with hydrochloric acid to disrupt peptide bonds (1909–1962); direct chemical synthesis with acrylonitrile (1962–1973), and bacterial fermentation (the current method)." Its acceptance and rejection over time follows pretty much precisely how non-endogenous-to-nature the manufacturing process is. I'm not making a value judgement if non-endogenous-to-nature foods are good or bad. I'm just saying I agree with you, and that it's actually really clear and easy to define scientifically what people mean when they say "natural" versus "fake." It's just that science pedants are really stubborn. They parrot their "dihydrogen monoxide" and "chemicals" jokes and they don't really get that there's a long history of industrial, non-endogenous-to-nature manufacturing betraying consumers with nasty side effects, pollution and disease. It's really unempathetic to people and it's not good for real scientific goals, like reducing our impact on the environment and improving trust in science.
    • 8y ago
• homero 8y ago
  Pink slime is usually shown as chicken which is really called mechanically separated chicken
• ecocentrik 8y ago
  Successful litigation does not make something true/false. The court, in a case like this, does not rule on the quality of the chemical process or the effects of short/long term human ingestion. Settlement amounts are based on potential damages to sales.