Back in 2012 many Americans were horrified to learn that their ground beef contained "pink slime." It's in our burgers! They're feeding it to our kids! The public outcry led many retailers to drop the beef additive from its products. But today, pink slime is slowly making its way back into our cheeseburgers and tacos. And that's a good thing. Or, at the very least, it's not a thing worth freaking out over.
If you're wondering why pink slime is back on the rise, you can thank two factors: today's skyrocketing beef prices (up 27% in the past two years), and the fact that pink slime is and has always been harmless.
"It is a shame that pink slime has taken up so much of the intellectual energy around food safety issues," Sarah Klein at the Center for Science in the Public Interest told me over the phone. "Because on a continuum of actual serious threats to public health from food, pink slime doesn't register."
Klein works for a non-profit organization that fights for consumer health and safety. And she's absolutely right. The social media hype in which this site took part—over pink slime two years ago was absurd. The use of pink slime in ground beef was not a threat to public health. And the media frenzy around it distracted from some very real problems in the way that food is produced and regulated in the United States.
Today we're taking a look at the entire pink slime mess, culled from interviews done over the past few days with pink slime producers like Cargill, food safety advocacy organizations like Center for Science in the Public Interest, food safety experts at colleges like Texas A&M, and the agency that regulates pink slime, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
We'll talk about everything from what actually goes into making the product to why it became controversial in the first place to whether it should be labeled as an ingredient in ground beef. We'll even explore if such a thing as certified-organic pink slime could one day exist.
Pink slime is no filet mignon, but it wasn't designed to be. And with everything currently broken in our messy little world, it's probably the least scary of our many food dystopias.
Pink slime production is an effort to get more beef into ground beef, using technology that our ancestors who first domesticated cattle didn't have access to. It's certainly efficient, though arguably gross to think about—especially if you have a general aversion to literally hearing about how the sausage gets made.
There are two main producers of "pink slime" in the U.S.: Cargill and Beef Products, Inc. (BPI), both of whom have their own patented processes and names for what's essentially the same thing. Cargill calls its patented process "finely textured beef." BPI calls it "lean finely textured beef." The difference is semantic. Here's what both products actually are.
