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>Why is this supposed to upset me? The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that
by jdietrich 8y ago
>Why is this supposed to upset me?
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.
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'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'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 "pink slime" or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that would otherwise go to waste.
Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean beef, because it is lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured beef, but it's widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily substituted by citric acid in this application. If you're concerned about health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to get more meat from every carcass.
(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)
- cageface 8y agoWe 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. I wish this point was brought up more in nutrition discussions. Most of these recent fad diets like keto, paleo, and carnivore are beyond the means of most people in the world. So even if we accept, for the sake of argument (which I don't), that they have nutritional advantages there should be a giant asterisk at the end of the argument.
- nightski 8y agoketo a fad diet? It's been around since the 1920s...
- cageface 8y agoFor treating epileptics yes, not as a diet recommended for general use. https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epilepsy/dietary-therapies/ketogenic-diet https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps...
- sjwright 8y ago“Not a diet recommended for general use” can be legitimately said of many defined diets and can DEFINITELY be said of the actual eating habits of most western people. Keto (i.e. any diet that triggers ketones) is a compelling option for numerous reasons, not just epileptics. It’s definitely not a good default for the wider population. And it is of course environmentally and economically inefficient. But ketogenisis is a reality of our biochemistry and shouldn’t be dismissed in the same way as other diets.
- hskaw 8y agoThis is very dishonest. Pink slime contains connective tissue and muscle. There's no way it's equivalent in terms of nutritional value to actual meat. And don't forget it's treated with ammonia, which is the reason it's banned in the first world.
- yesenadam 8y agoUm, you know 'meat' = muscle, right?
- freeone3000 8y agoA ribeye steak is comprised of connective tissue and muscle. Of course it's the same nutritionally, because it's the same stuff.
- deogeo 8y agoIs this what it has come to? Accusing of classism the people upset that food labeling regulations are getting slowly dismantled? Please consider that using the whole animal is a different thing to labeling the resulting product however they want.
- sjwright 8y agoGround beef is such an ambiguous, broad-brush term that it couldn’t not include this.
- jdietrich 8y agoA lot of people decided that LFTB was horrible stuff, based on no real evidence other than the fact that it's cheap. We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef. I'm not convinced that LFTB is sufficiently different to conventional minced beef to warrant specific labelling; we don't expect every ingredient to come with a precise description of how it was processed, despite the very substantial transformations that occur during e.g. flour processing. Classism in food is absolutely endemic. A slightly facile but still important example is this paper from the BMJ in 2012. It analysed the nutritional content of 100 supermarket packaged meals and 100 recipes by popular British TV chefs. It found that the ready-made meals contained significantly fewer calories, less fat and more fibre than the recipes. We judge people for living on a diet of microwaveable meals, but switching to home-cooked meals might actually be a retrograde step in terms of nutrition if they follow the recipes of Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson. Something feels intuitively wrong about that conclusion; that feeling is implicit classism. https://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e7607 https://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e7607
- rocky1138 8y ago> we don't expect every ingredient to come with a precise description of how it was processed, despite the very substantial transformations that occur during e.g. flour processing. I expect this, but I've been disappointed at how we are doing so far as a society.
- 8y ago
- burfog 8y agoIt's not honestly lean beef. If it were, it would be red. It'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. We could call it "pureed tendons, ligaments, defatted fat tissue, cartilage, lean beef, and ammonia or citric acid". That is a long and unwieldy name. The common name, known to consumers, is pink slime.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- captainbland 8y agoYeah although calling it 'slime' is basically just trying to bring about associations with, for instance, rotting meat or vegetables (which often end up with a slimy texture) for the sake of shocking people and bringing in an audience of predominantly more well off people who "would never eat that". So rather than give it a name which is deliberately off-putting it's probably better to give it something vaguely neutral and otherwise let it stand on its own merits, whatever they may be.
- burfog 8y agoPeople eat okra, escargot (snails), and natto. All of those have slime. The name "pink slime" isn't from ABC. It's from an FDA employee who got to examine the stuff.
- captainbland 8y agoRegardless, we wrap literally everything else in shiny marketing nonsense. Using it to get people to eat the entire edible part of the animal rather than wasting it is kind of a win from an environmental POV. I mean arguably it'd be better if we just stopped eating meat, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.
- dmurray 8y agoUsing "beef" to mean "unspecified bits of cow used as food" isn't exactly butchering the English language.
- noio 8y agoI just wanted to say I've found your comments throughout this thread to be valuable and thoughtful. Reminds me why it's worth my time reading HN every now and then.