I’ve got slime on the mind. Not that old Nickelodeon show slime or the green ectoplasm stuff from Ghostbusters, but pink slime.
The meat industry, in their zeal to be as efficient as possible, are now selling Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings, or BLBT, in supermarkets as ground beef. Apparently, this Play-Doh-like substance is in 70% of conventional ground beef.
However, the substance, critics said, is more like gelatin than meat, and before Beef Products Inc. found a way to use it by disinfecting the trimmings with ammonia it was sold only to dog food or cooking oil suppliers.
Now, I’m all for finding uses for everything. But, as my new pal Will Harris of White Oak Pastures told me, feeding this byproduct to people may be too high a use for it. Perhaps only dog food should be “slimed.” At the very least, I’d say labeling is a solid idea.
It certainly doesn’t put me in the mood to make burgers. And, it also gives new meaning to that old question: Where’s the beef?
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Congrats to last week’s book giveaway winner, Megan!
3 Comments
Yet another reason to avoid CAFO/supermarket meat. The reasons just keep adding up. When I listen to myself describe my food processes to someone else I sound like a nut, even to myself. It happened gradually and without overall plan But put it all together – meal planning, aggressive leftover reduction, buying meat in bulk, grinding my own meat unless it comes from the bulk purchase, etc. – it sounds extreme.
This is one of the main reasons I buy ground beef from a local farmer. I don’t have to wonder if I have pink slime in my beef.
People eat a lot of weird stuff. I wouldn’t eat snails, but I know a lot of folks who love ’em. Snakes, eel, grasshoppers, ants, a whole panoply of insects in fact are food to people around the world.
Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings is a safe, nutritious product that helps keep the cost of hamburger low (or lower) and reduces the amount of waste from processing a beef carcass. (This is a processing matter, not how the animal was raised. You could make BLBT from lean grassfed cows just as easily as any feedlot beef.)
The debate about this product is all about asthetics. It may be unappealing to middle class American sensibilities. But how can we condemn consumers for rejecting produce that’s less than perfect and then turn around and condemn processors for striving to get as much edible meat from an animal carcass?