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>Basically, pink slime is highly processed leavings of beef that cannot be used except by putting it through more or less a blender and a chemistry lab. After

>Basically, pink slime is highly processed leavings of beef that cannot be used except by putting it through more or less a blender and a chemistry lab. After butchering a carcass, you're left with a lot of fatty trimmings with small amounts of meat attached that are uneconomical to recover by hand. If you gently heat the fat trimmings and spin them in a centrifuge, you cleanly separate the lean meat from the fat. That process weakens the cell walls of the muscle fibres, which increases the risk of bacterial growth; to kill the bacteria, ammonium hydroxide gas is used to raise the pH. The FDA deems ammonium hydroxide to be safe, so it is widely used in US food manufacturing as an acidity regulator and antimicrobial agent. Other regulators disagree on the safety of ammonium hydroxide, in which case citric acid is used. The production of LFTB is no weirder than any number of other food processes. It's a simple, efficient method for separating meat from fat. The media have made a mountain out of a molehill by sensationally revealing a "shocking secret" that is neither shocking nor secret. Personally, I think that a lot of consumers just prefer not to think about how meat ends up on their plate and recoil at any discussion of the process that turns live animals into hamburger patties. We really need to be talking about the use of antibiotics as a growth promoter, which is a slow-motion catastrophe that the US regulators are largely ignoring.

joe_the_user 8y ago
After butchering a carcass, you're left with a lot of fatty trimmings with small amounts of meat attached that are uneconomical to recover by hand. If you gently heat the fat trimmings and spin them in a centrifuge, you cleanly separate the lean meat from the fat. That process weakens the cell walls of the muscle fibres, which increases the risk of bacterial growth; to kill the bacteria, ammonium hydroxide gas is used to raise the pH. The FDA deems ammonium hydroxide to be safe, so it is widely used in US food manufacturing as an acidity regulator and antimicrobial agent. Other regulators disagree on the safety of ammonium hydroxide, in which case citric acid is used. That's a fine sell. Now sell me on, "this is so OK that we should have a statutory right not to ever mention this fact. Which is to repeat the point that this tug-of-war isn't about "can you do it?" or "is it safe" but "do you even have to say anything?". The problem is indeed how little consumers can determine about safety once it becomes obvious industry is throwing things all in a giant food processor and then mixing up things that appear simple. It makes people nervous even if, let's say, in this case everything is fine. Because, suppose, in the case of antibiotics, everything is not fine at all? Do you want the precedent that "hey, once the expert decide everything is OK, then it's decided that things are sooo OK that you aren't allowed to talk about it at all". Which is to say, safe or not, problem or not, it's pink slime. That was what it was called before ABC and that's rather clearly an appropriate term. And pink slime is shocking because consumers don't know anything. Keep the situation where the real processes of food production are shocking and hidden? Good idea? I believe not.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >That's a fine sell. Now sell me on, "this is so OK that we should have a statutory right not to ever mention this fact. Food production is really, really complex. If an organic burrito was labelled with every process involved in its production, it would come with a label the size of a telephone directory. Over-labelling is just as problematic as under-labelling, as we have seen with Prop 65; adding more words to a label often actively impedes the ability of a consumer to make meaningful choices. We rely on the regulators to determine what processes and ingredients are sufficiently safe for the food chain and to highlight issues of particular concern. Some people think that FTLB is unsafe, but they have no real evidence for that claim. It has attracted a vastly disproportionate amount of attention, seemingly only for reasons of squeamishness. Regulators are not infallible or incorruptible, which is why it is important that they are held to account. If we're quibbling over the labelling of something that's demonstrably fine, we're not talking about the hundred other glaring issues in the US food system that need to be addressed much more urgently. FTLB is simply irrelevant. It's broadly beneficial, but it's neither good or bad enough to warrant our attention. The grossly disproportionate amount of attention it has attracted is symptomatic of a faddish, panic-driven and deeply irrational approach to food that is entirely unproductive.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Food production is really, really complex. If an organic burrito was labelled with every process involved in its production, it would come with a label the size of a telephone directory. What I am talking about is "doing you have the right know what's happening?" What that is printed on the back of a given label is a different matter, you think? Some people think that FTLB is unsafe, but they have no evidence for that claim. It has attracted a vastly disproportionate amount of attention, seemingly only for reasons of squeamishness. Sure, for reasons of squeemishness. Industrial scale food production is complex. Some of the details make people squeemish even if they're safe. Other details make people squeemish and are in fact things to worry about. The relevant question is should light be able to be shed everywhere. Should industrial be forced to openly defend unappealing but safe practices or should industry have a giant hammer to shut up any mention of things with "bad visuals"?
ramphastidae 8y ago
You seem quite informed on the subject — do you have an opinion as to whether meats labeled 'raised without antibiotics' or 'no hormones added' are any better or worse than conventional?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
behringer 8y ago
So if I want to eat nice meat cuts ground up, without getting slime, what do I do?
- artificialLimbs 8y ago
  Know your farmer.
- jannyfer 8y ago
  In Canada, you can go to a local grocery store or meat shop and choose meat cuts and have them grind them for you on the spot.
  - prepend 8y ago
    In the US too, all major grocery stores in my area you can ask them to grind up a chuck roast or any cut of meat and they will. It costs a little more depending on the price of the cut you select.
- analog31 8y ago
  My mom had a crank operated grinder that was mainly for making sausage but worked pretty well. Where it came from is relegated to the forgotten past.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  Given how bad ground beef is for your health you're better off swapping it for ground chicken / quorn / lentils. I've personally largely switched to veggie ingredients for Lasagne and Moussaka. That was for taste reasons too but the health benefits are a nice bonus ;)
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    I'm surprised that I'm getting so many downvotes for this post? Are people so scared by even the mention of eating a meal without meat? I eat a healthy and well balanced diet and I honestly don't understand that way of thinking from my fellow carnivores.
Robotbeat 8y ago
The idiom "it's best not to watch the sausage being made" comes to mind, here.
samatman 8y ago
Fine as far as it goes. I would assert there is less difference between sirloin and skirt steak than there is between ground beef and LFTB. It’s illegal to claim that skirt steak is sirloin. Why should it be legal to call LFTB ground beef?
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Don’t you think you could tell the difference between a sirloin steak and skirt steak? Totally different shape, texture, level of fat, and flavor. But not sure one could tell ground beef (no regulation on what cuts are used: could be chuck, brisket, a mix) from the same ground beef with some LFTB mixed in.
paganel 8y ago
It’s really shocking to me, and I’ve eaten lots and lots of meat (including beef) from animals raised and then killed by my close relatives. It’s only that my grand-parents weren’t using a centrifugal thingie to get the most out of the cow they had just sacrificed, and ammonium hydroxide might have been from an alien planet to them. The way we industrially process meat is shocking, yes.
- scotty79 8y ago
  > It’s only that my grand-parents weren’t using a centrifugal thingie Did our other close relatives use the centrifugal thingie while processing the meat from animals they raised and killed?
  - paganel 8y ago
    Wanted to not repeat the same word in two consecutive phrases, hence my not-perfect choice of words, but to answer your question: no, afaik all the relatives that I know who had killed their meat didn’t use any industrial-like tools to process it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - scotty79 8y ago
      Seems pretty straightforward. Grind and heat up meat trimmings, spin it to squeeze the heated fat out. Add citric acid as a preservative, flavour it with some spices, freeze an you have nice bit of fairly lean meat you wouldn't otherwise have. Nothing that couldn't be done at home. I wonder how fast it needs to spin.
- cecilpl2 8y ago
  And isn't it great that we have figured out ways to efficiently use more of the resources we have available? The alternative is we just throw it away and raise more cows, using far more resources.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> sensationally revealing a "shocking secret" that is neither shocking nor secret In which case, what's the problem simply labelling meat that has been through this complex mechanical and chemical process? Let consumers choose from a position of awareness. Allowing it to all be labelled the same as meat that has simply been through a mincer is industry burying it for easier profit. Thankfully the EU chose to ban these ammonia treated processed products, though industry is working quite hard to find loopholes to sell us a product we won't buy knowingly. I'm slightly entertained to learn that what the USDA defines as "lean" at 22.5% is higher fat than the cheap higher fat mince (20%) in UK supermarkets. Lean here would normally be 10 or sometimes even 5%. Fully agree the antibiotic abuse needs to be resolved though.
- RHSeeger 8y ago
  Lean in US supermarkets tends to be, as you said, 10 or sometimes even 5%. I buy 9% because I've found lower than that impacts the taste too much.
brownbat 8y ago
Really appreciate the calm, thoughtful, and informed devil's advocate perspective, we need more of that for meaningful discussions. > We really need to be talking about the use of antibiotics as a growth promoter I don't have fully formed views on this so I'm curious... Are your concerns about antibiotics based on a fear of reduced effectiveness of human medicines? A cursory search makes it look like significant chunk of animal antibiotics are ionophores, which are entirely different from what's used in human medicine... maybe you have a different concern? Are you ok with ionophores? Or if not, how do you propose limiting the impact of coccidiosis, which seems widely prevalent in poultry and leads to massive gut damage and animal suffering if not treated prophylactically? Your point on 'pink slime' seems to be that once you dig beyond the headlines, food regulation and safety issues are far more complicated than the bumper stickers. Not so with animal antibiotics? Or is your concern with those similarly more nuanced than most of the popular complaints?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >Are your concerns about antibiotics based on a fear of reduced effectiveness of human medicines? Yes. Over 60% of the antibiotics given to livestock are medically important to humans. There's clear evidence that this is translating into increased antibiotic-resistant infections in both livestock and humans. The FDA have implemented the Veterinary Feed Directive, but these regulations are light-touch compared to the EU and have some fairly glaring loopholes. There's a legitimate debate about the use of ionophores, but medically important antibiotics are all too often used as a sticking-plaster to ameliorate the effects of poor animal husbandry. If you're keeping huge numbers of animals in cramped and unsanitary conditions, you should really fix that issue before you start routinely dumping lincomycin or penicillin into feed. The use of medically important antibiotics purely for the purposes of growth promotion is both widespread and unjustifiable. The problem is inarguably worse in the developing world (particularly Asia) but the US should really be a leader rather than a follower on this issue. The WHO have issued clear guidelines on preventing antibiotic resistance in agriculture, but the FDA have been dragging their heels on actually implementing those guidelines in an effective manner. Other countries (particularly the EU) have implemented relatively strict controls with no real impact on animal welfare and fairly marginal economic impact. Even if you doubt the strength of the evidence, the risk/reward calculus strongly points towards heavy restrictions on the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock; slightly cheaper meat is a pretty poor upside compared to the risk of an antibiotic-resistant epidemic. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30141-9/fulltext?elsca1=tlxpr https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/258970/9789241550130-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/258970/9789...
tracker1 8y ago
Mostly agreed... To me, it's not so dissimilar to the processing of a lot of other foods... segmenting citrus for pre-pealed/canned versions or handling/processing of cashews or even how black olives are express-ripened beyond nature. While, personally, I feel that lean meats are wholly unnatural and fattier cuts/grounds should be preferred, I'm not sure there's a lot to get worked up about. The low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-salt diet trends are probably the single worst trends to happen to american health. The issues around antibiotics are also huge. For the most part, people are far better off avoiding refined sugars, grains and refined vegetable oils. If most people did that, without any other measures taken, things would be a lot better. Not eating processed meat in general not withstanding.

joe_the_user 8y ago

After butchering a carcass, you're left with a lot of fatty trimmings with small amounts of meat attached that are uneconomical to recover by hand. If you gently heat the fat trimmings and spin them in a centrifuge, you cleanly separate the lean meat from the fat. That process weakens the cell walls of the muscle fibres, which increases the risk of bacterial growth; to kill the bacteria, ammonium hydroxide gas is used to raise the pH. The FDA deems ammonium hydroxide to be safe, so it is widely used in US food manufacturing as an acidity regulator and antimicrobial agent. Other regulators disagree on the safety of ammonium hydroxide, in which case citric acid is used. That's a fine sell. Now sell me on, "this is so OK that we should have a statutory right not to ever mention this fact. Which is to repeat the point that this tug-of-war isn't about "can you do it?" or "is it safe" but "do you even have to say anything?". The problem is indeed how little consumers can determine about safety once it becomes obvious industry is throwing things all in a giant food processor and then mixing up things that appear simple. It makes people nervous even if, let's say, in this case everything is fine. Because, suppose, in the case of antibiotics, everything is not fine at all? Do you want the precedent that "hey, once the expert decide everything is OK, then it's decided that things are sooo OK that you aren't allowed to talk about it at all". Which is to say, safe or not, problem or not, it's pink slime. That was what it was called before ABC and that's rather clearly an appropriate term. And pink slime is shocking because consumers don't know anything. Keep the situation where the real processes of food production are shocking and hidden? Good idea? I believe not.

jdietrich 8y ago
>That's a fine sell. Now sell me on, "this is so OK that we should have a statutory right not to ever mention this fact. Food production is really, really complex. If an organic burrito was labelled with every process involved in its production, it would come with a label the size of a telephone directory. Over-labelling is just as problematic as under-labelling, as we have seen with Prop 65; adding more words to a label often actively impedes the ability of a consumer to make meaningful choices. We rely on the regulators to determine what processes and ingredients are sufficiently safe for the food chain and to highlight issues of particular concern. Some people think that FTLB is unsafe, but they have no real evidence for that claim. It has attracted a vastly disproportionate amount of attention, seemingly only for reasons of squeamishness. Regulators are not infallible or incorruptible, which is why it is important that they are held to account. If we're quibbling over the labelling of something that's demonstrably fine, we're not talking about the hundred other glaring issues in the US food system that need to be addressed much more urgently. FTLB is simply irrelevant. It's broadly beneficial, but it's neither good or bad enough to warrant our attention. The grossly disproportionate amount of attention it has attracted is symptomatic of a faddish, panic-driven and deeply irrational approach to food that is entirely unproductive.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Food production is really, really complex. If an organic burrito was labelled with every process involved in its production, it would come with a label the size of a telephone directory. What I am talking about is "doing you have the right know what's happening?" What that is printed on the back of a given label is a different matter, you think? Some people think that FTLB is unsafe, but they have no evidence for that claim. It has attracted a vastly disproportionate amount of attention, seemingly only for reasons of squeamishness. Sure, for reasons of squeemishness. Industrial scale food production is complex. Some of the details make people squeemish even if they're safe. Other details make people squeemish and are in fact things to worry about. The relevant question is should light be able to be shed everywhere. Should industrial be forced to openly defend unappealing but safe practices or should industry have a giant hammer to shut up any mention of things with "bad visuals"?

ramphastidae 8y ago

You seem quite informed on the subject — do you have an opinion as to whether meats labeled 'raised without antibiotics' or 'no hormones added' are any better or worse than conventional?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

behringer 8y ago

So if I want to eat nice meat cuts ground up, without getting slime, what do I do?

artificialLimbs 8y ago
Know your farmer.
jannyfer 8y ago
In Canada, you can go to a local grocery store or meat shop and choose meat cuts and have them grind them for you on the spot.
- prepend 8y ago
  In the US too, all major grocery stores in my area you can ask them to grind up a chuck roast or any cut of meat and they will. It costs a little more depending on the price of the cut you select.
analog31 8y ago
My mom had a crank operated grinder that was mainly for making sausage but worked pretty well. Where it came from is relegated to the forgotten past.
radicalbyte 8y ago
Given how bad ground beef is for your health you're better off swapping it for ground chicken / quorn / lentils. I've personally largely switched to veggie ingredients for Lasagne and Moussaka. That was for taste reasons too but the health benefits are a nice bonus ;)
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  I'm surprised that I'm getting so many downvotes for this post? Are people so scared by even the mention of eating a meal without meat? I eat a healthy and well balanced diet and I honestly don't understand that way of thinking from my fellow carnivores.

Robotbeat 8y ago

The idiom "it's best not to watch the sausage being made" comes to mind, here.

samatman 8y ago

Fine as far as it goes. I would assert there is less difference between sirloin and skirt steak than there is between ground beef and LFTB. It’s illegal to claim that skirt steak is sirloin. Why should it be legal to call LFTB ground beef?

WillPostForFood 8y ago
Don’t you think you could tell the difference between a sirloin steak and skirt steak? Totally different shape, texture, level of fat, and flavor. But not sure one could tell ground beef (no regulation on what cuts are used: could be chuck, brisket, a mix) from the same ground beef with some LFTB mixed in.

paganel 8y ago

It’s really shocking to me, and I’ve eaten lots and lots of meat (including beef) from animals raised and then killed by my close relatives. It’s only that my grand-parents weren’t using a centrifugal thingie to get the most out of the cow they had just sacrificed, and ammonium hydroxide might have been from an alien planet to them. The way we industrially process meat is shocking, yes.

scotty79 8y ago
> It’s only that my grand-parents weren’t using a centrifugal thingie Did our other close relatives use the centrifugal thingie while processing the meat from animals they raised and killed?
- paganel 8y ago
  Wanted to not repeat the same word in two consecutive phrases, hence my not-perfect choice of words, but to answer your question: no, afaik all the relatives that I know who had killed their meat didn’t use any industrial-like tools to process it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - scotty79 8y ago
    Seems pretty straightforward. Grind and heat up meat trimmings, spin it to squeeze the heated fat out. Add citric acid as a preservative, flavour it with some spices, freeze an you have nice bit of fairly lean meat you wouldn't otherwise have. Nothing that couldn't be done at home. I wonder how fast it needs to spin.
cecilpl2 8y ago
And isn't it great that we have figured out ways to efficiently use more of the resources we have available? The alternative is we just throw it away and raise more cows, using far more resources.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

> sensationally revealing a "shocking secret" that is neither shocking nor secret In which case, what's the problem simply labelling meat that has been through this complex mechanical and chemical process? Let consumers choose from a position of awareness. Allowing it to all be labelled the same as meat that has simply been through a mincer is industry burying it for easier profit. Thankfully the EU chose to ban these ammonia treated processed products, though industry is working quite hard to find loopholes to sell us a product we won't buy knowingly. I'm slightly entertained to learn that what the USDA defines as "lean" at 22.5% is higher fat than the cheap higher fat mince (20%) in UK supermarkets. Lean here would normally be 10 or sometimes even 5%. Fully agree the antibiotic abuse needs to be resolved though.

RHSeeger 8y ago
Lean in US supermarkets tends to be, as you said, 10 or sometimes even 5%. I buy 9% because I've found lower than that impacts the taste too much.

brownbat 8y ago

Really appreciate the calm, thoughtful, and informed devil's advocate perspective, we need more of that for meaningful discussions. > We really need to be talking about the use of antibiotics as a growth promoter I don't have fully formed views on this so I'm curious... Are your concerns about antibiotics based on a fear of reduced effectiveness of human medicines? A cursory search makes it look like significant chunk of animal antibiotics are ionophores, which are entirely different from what's used in human medicine... maybe you have a different concern? Are you ok with ionophores? Or if not, how do you propose limiting the impact of coccidiosis, which seems widely prevalent in poultry and leads to massive gut damage and animal suffering if not treated prophylactically? Your point on 'pink slime' seems to be that once you dig beyond the headlines, food regulation and safety issues are far more complicated than the bumper stickers. Not so with animal antibiotics? Or is your concern with those similarly more nuanced than most of the popular complaints?

jdietrich 8y ago
>Are your concerns about antibiotics based on a fear of reduced effectiveness of human medicines? Yes. Over 60% of the antibiotics given to livestock are medically important to humans. There's clear evidence that this is translating into increased antibiotic-resistant infections in both livestock and humans. The FDA have implemented the Veterinary Feed Directive, but these regulations are light-touch compared to the EU and have some fairly glaring loopholes. There's a legitimate debate about the use of ionophores, but medically important antibiotics are all too often used as a sticking-plaster to ameliorate the effects of poor animal husbandry. If you're keeping huge numbers of animals in cramped and unsanitary conditions, you should really fix that issue before you start routinely dumping lincomycin or penicillin into feed. The use of medically important antibiotics purely for the purposes of growth promotion is both widespread and unjustifiable. The problem is inarguably worse in the developing world (particularly Asia) but the US should really be a leader rather than a follower on this issue. The WHO have issued clear guidelines on preventing antibiotic resistance in agriculture, but the FDA have been dragging their heels on actually implementing those guidelines in an effective manner. Other countries (particularly the EU) have implemented relatively strict controls with no real impact on animal welfare and fairly marginal economic impact. Even if you doubt the strength of the evidence, the risk/reward calculus strongly points towards heavy restrictions on the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock; slightly cheaper meat is a pretty poor upside compared to the risk of an antibiotic-resistant epidemic. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30141-9/fulltext?elsca1=tlxpr https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/258970/9789241550130-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/258970/9789...

tracker1 8y ago

Mostly agreed... To me, it's not so dissimilar to the processing of a lot of other foods... segmenting citrus for pre-pealed/canned versions or handling/processing of cashews or even how black olives are express-ripened beyond nature. While, personally, I feel that lean meats are wholly unnatural and fattier cuts/grounds should be preferred, I'm not sure there's a lot to get worked up about. The low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-salt diet trends are probably the single worst trends to happen to american health. The issues around antibiotics are also huge. For the most part, people are far better off avoiding refined sugars, grains and refined vegetable oils. If most people did that, without any other measures taken, things would be a lot better. Not eating processed meat in general not withstanding.