Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef

[arikara]

You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."

This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage," and turned into "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips".

...

http://www.alternet.org/environment/144904/yummy!_ammonia-treated_pink_slime_now_in_most_u.s._ground_beef

That is just so gross. Does anyone know if it is allowed in Canada? They keep trying to "harmonize" all our laws and safety standards.

[timeforpeace]

1. Blame game. Bush's fault. Canada's next.

[Warpy]

2. Solution: buy larger cuts, wash them, and grind them yourselves

When I ate meat, I used two cleavers to grind it on a cutting block, alternating chops. It gave me great control over the final grind and got my aggression out nicely.

Just be aware that it is less fatty. You might want to buy a little suet to incorporate into it as you chop.

[DJ13]

4. Crap, I need to put my glasses on

I thought your post said:
Solution: buy larger cAts, wash them, and grind them yourselves

:blush:

[Yuugal]

8. thats ok

the article about the lady surviving a multiple organ transplant read to me like multiple orgasm transplant. I wanted to sign up for some of that.....not so much when I reread it. I broke my new glasses recently and had to go back to the old ones sigh. :)

[DJ13]

9. You win!

:rofl: :rofl:
:rofl: :rofl:

:thumbsup:

[Warpy]

24. That's OK, I still do that stuff with my glasses on

and large text on the screen.

Bad eyesight is a neverending source of both wonder and misunderstanding.

[flvegan]

12. If I ate meat, this is what I'd do.

I'd probably also try to track down a local livestock place to buy meat from to begin with. The fewer middlemen, the better.

[polly7]

3. I saw that article too but am not sure if we eat the nummy pink slime here,

will have to check.

[endless october]

5. i still enjoy a good burger.

would feel better if i could buy irradiated ground beef more easily, though.

[I Have A Dream]

6. I read this yesterday. Made me even more glad that I'm a vegetarian.

However, even fruits and vegetables are frankenfood unless you can afford to buy organic. (...and corporations are even trying to take control of the organic standards.)

Thanks, arikara! :hi:

K&R.

[arikara]

26. Makes me wish even more

that we were vegetarian. We do eat less and less meat all the time, and mostly buy locally range grown. If only I could get the Mr to translate his love of animals to not eating them, and I do keep working on him. I never eat meat when he's out of town.

[pissedoff01]

7. Well, at least they didn't use the urinal in their process

or did they

[Festivito]

10. The stores stopped grinding their own.

The big stores around here.

I have a local butcher still holding on. I prefer to pay his higher prices or do without.

[frazzled]

11. Okay, I've been wanting a meat grinder for some time

Now I may buy one for sure.

There's the kind you clamp onto your counter and turn manually, but I'm not sure how they work. (It used to work for my grandmother, I think.)

Or you can spend $100 more and get this:

http://www.macys.com/catalog/product/index.ognc?ID=102506&BannerID=PD677&PartnerID=LINKSHARE&LinkshareID=fDklYaGulKY-6z2eLPAVkYgxZWczsIm_7Q

Or I suppose, if you had a Kitchen-Aid Stand mixer, you could just get the attachment. But I don't have one.


I never buy ground meat (or any meat, for that matter) from a regular supermarket, but now I don't quite trust buying it from anyone. Although, come to think of it: we sneaked into Whole Foods the other week (my boycott is melting) and they had a sale on ground sirloin--$3.59 a pound. But they were out, so I asked the guy if they had any more, and he said he'd go grind some. We came back after picking up a few more things, and he had a freshly ground (if he wasn't lying) batch in the metal tub waiting for us.

[TreasonousBastard]

16. The big iron clamp-on ones work great, but I use the food processor...

Cut the meat into 1-2" chunks, or bigger if the job gets too hectic.

Stick it all in a bag in the freezer until it's almost frozen. If it gets rock hard, let it thaw some before grinding.

Throw it in the food processor and pulse until it's as ground as you want. If you have a lot to grind up, grind it in batches. And don't add any meat while grinding or it won't be a uniform grind.

(Practice, as always, makes perfecter.)

[frazzled]

21. Thanks for the tip

I tried once to grind meat in the Cuisinart, as per some article somewhere, but I wasn't totally happy with the texture.

But I didn't try freezing it. I can see where that would be helpful.

[TreasonousBastard]

22. Yeah, I noticed that with fresh meat- if it's too soft it just gets...

mashed around and gloppy instead of nicely chopped up. And kinda stringy.

Not appetizing at all.

[jgraz]

31. Just invest in an extra chef's knife and chop it by hand.

Use one knife in each hand, go at it like a drum major. Stop when desired consistency is reached.

Best. Burger. Ever.

[TreasonousBastard]

32. I've tried that, and am not very good at it...

tried it chopping herbs and veggies, too, and with similar ghastly results. And I tried it with Chinese cleavers, too.

Much faster and easier for me to clean the food processor or use just one knife.

[jgraz]

33. Oh yeah, it's disastrous for herbs and veggies.

I bet you had bits of parsley flying all over your kitchen. (speaking from experience ;))

Meat works much better as the moisture lets it hang together while you chop. Cut the beef into a small dice to start. Keep the knives low, hold them as parallel as comfort allows and go as slow as you need to. When the meat flattens out, scrape it into an oblong pile and go again across the length. You'd be surprised how quickly this results in lovely chopped beef.

And even if it doesn't work for you, at least you've got yourself a shiny new chef's knife. :D


Edit: Oh, and make sure your knives are razor-sharp before you start, or you'll end up with smashed beef (much less appetizing).

[noamnety]

13. I've been buying meat from an actual butcher.

A whole beef tenderloin - if you don't buy it at a chain store - is $3.99/lb. My butcher trims it right in front of me, the trimmings from it go straight into his ground beeferator right in front of my eyes and get wrapped right alongside my filet mignons as tasty nonmystery burger meat. The filets work out to about a dollar a piece, or the same price as a nasty fast food ammonia burger. Yet another reason to shop local.

[Ian David]

14. Wendy's hamburgers seem to contain chunks of cartilage. n/t

[gateley]

15. I was just telling somebody about this. There was a discussion

last night here about the safety of irradiated foods vs the pink slime.

That's not the point! The point is that they have included parts of beef in human food that used to be used only for pet food. The point is that they never told us so we could decide whether or not to ingest the stuff.

[inna]

17. gross is an understatement.

[cliffordu]

18. I'm thinking this doesn't apply to Costco - IIRC

they grind their own beef....

I know they make their own pumpkin pies....num num....

[dkf]

23. I hope you are right.

All our grocery shopping is at Costco. Unless we want only a little bit of it.

[PDJane]

19. The answer appears to be 'sort of'.

We don't put it in Canadian beef, we don't process quite the same way, and we don't allow animal feed to contain the by-products of ethanol processing.

However, we don't screen it out of the meat, beef or pork or chicken, that we get from the US.

The answer to that, in my humble opinion, is to know where your meat comes from. I get mine at the farmer's market, if I eat the stuff. That way, I know what they're putting into the stuff, where they get the carcasses and important stuff like that. And cut out seafood, unless you know where it's processed. Large companies like HighLiner send the stuff to be processed in Russia and packed in China.......it's disgusting. If I eat fish or whatever, I want to know exactly where it comes from.....and where it's been.

And frankly, I'm utterly shocked at the amount of sugar that goes into sauces and pickles and what not...it's utterly disgusting.

[arikara]

25. There isn't much that is processed

that we have in our house. I pick up a box of whatever in the grocery store, read the label and put it back on the shelf. However we do pick up a small pack of hamburger once in awhile, and I have noticed that the consistency and taste is different than it used to be which is why I was wondering if they are doing the same in Canada. You can bet that any of the fast food joints have the same meat byproducts instead of real hamburger.

For sure, farmers market is best, where you know that the food is raised and processed ethically.

[PDJane]

28. Yeah, the processed stuff is outrageous.

and all those corn products are GM products. Of all the things that are liable to be GM crops, most of them are in fast food: soy, corn, canola, rapeseed, tomatoes, potatoes, sugar cane and beets.

I have a problem with a lot of the GM foods. Processed corn, in particular, tends to throw my blood sugar off for hours. I have to be incredibly careful with sweeteners; for instance, if you get icing sugar, it will have corn starch in it.....to keep it free flowing. Since it's usually mixed with fluid, I find this of no earthly value whatever!

A lot of yogurt is mixed with things like carmine (which is ground up insects) and gelatin, for texture. I prefer the stuff that is milk and bacterial culture, thank you.

The hamburger thing? I buy from the same guy at the market all the time. I've toured the farms, know what the stuff looks like, where it's grown, and how it's fed, thank you. My mother buys the stuff at the grocery store (ugh), and I have shown her this article. She's appalled, and has sworn off the stuff.

[TreasonousBastard]

20. If anybody actually bothers to read the Times article...

yeah, this stuff is nasty and does NOT retard bacteria growth as much as they say it does.

But, it's not in itself poisonous, so you're not gonna die if you had a burger last week and the gummint is cracking down on it, hence the newsworthiness of it all.

A lot of their customers are throwing the stuff out, too.

(I was reading the article in the Times the other day while eating in a Greek diner, thinking about how I almost ordered the meatloaf.)

[guyton]

27. avoid beef

I've been avoiding beef for several years now ... ever since an enterprising supplier was *prohibited* from testing all his beef for mad-cow. The system is perverse beyond measure.

Fortunately buffalo is easily available here, makes for good burgers :-)

[chimpyisstillsatan]

29. protein is protein

McDonalds tasted like shit long before it acually was shit.

[onethatcares]

30. it'll be a little while

before they let us know they've been mixing that into the batch. :puke:

[Recursion]

34. This is why I get my meat from a CSA

They slaughter and butcher on the farm, and you can see what they do.

http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

[Gman2]

35. SEE, the republicans are green. And conservative.

I worked in a meat dept for a while when young. I used that huge snowshovel, to scrape the guts off the floor. Way back when the animals were disassembled on-site. I stopped eating hamburger, when I saw how many passes it takes, to make the hamburger go from almost pure white, to pink. YUKK. Now, they use that scrapings, to feed right back into the hamburger. And for the same price as the real meat. Brilliant. Try that with a steak! Essentially, hamburger is now a sausage, without the casing. Maybe they'll find melamine, and flyash in there as well. They drip toxic waste into our drinking water, to off it, why not our food as well?

[Tutankhamun]

36. I just ate a roast beef sandwich, and I swear I tasted some weird ammonia-like substance.

Now, about 30 minutes later, I'm still "enjoying" that peculiar taste. I went to a local sandwich chain store, and now I regret it.