Report: USDA school lunch meat contains "pink slime"

CBS

(CBS News) McDonald's and other fast food chains may have gotten rid of "pink slime" from its burgers, but the gooey sounding chemical treatment that removes bacteria from meat is popping up elsewhere: Kids' school lunches.

The Daily reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plans to buy 7 million pounds of "Lean Beef Trimmings," what many dub pink slime, from Beef Products International (BPI) for the nation's school lunch programs. Though the USDA said in a statement that all meat "meet(s) the highest standard for food safety," many have decried the use of the beef item, including celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

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"The USDA-AMS [Agricultural Marketing Service] does allow for the inclusion of BPI Boneless Lean Beef in the ground beef they procure for all their federal food programs and, according to federal labeling requirements, it is not a raw material that is uniquely labeled," Amy Bell, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education Food Distribution Program, told The Daily in an email.

The USDA says that no more than 15 percent of each serving will consist of pink slime, MSNBC reported. Bell noted it is hard to tell from a finished product if the processed meat byproduct is included, making it hard for parents, students and consumers to discern for themselves.

The USDA could not be reached for comment by HealthPop.

Not many people are happy with this news, including microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein. He is widely credited for coming up with the term "pink slime" to describe the ammonia hydroxide-doused meat products salvaged from the scraps of slaughterhouses.

"I have a 2-year-old son," microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein told The Daily. "And you better believe I don't want him eating pink slime when he starts going to school."

"They've taken a processed product, without labeling it, and added it to raw ground beef," Zirnstein said.

According to the documentary "Food, Inc.", an executive with BPI said that the process helped lessen the incidents of E.coli, making the food safe. As of 2008, he claimed that the product is in 70 percent of hamburgers. He hoped in five years -- 2012 -- he expected pink slime to be in all patties.

In 2009, the New York Times wrote an expose on pink slime, saying that between 2005 and 2009 the product tested positive for salmonella four times higher than traditional burger ground beef. Moss added that the reason the USDA used the byproduct was because it "shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef."

Healthpop reported last month that McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell pledged to stop using the treated meat.

Food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel, known for her website The Lunch Tray, has started an online petition to stop the USDA from using the product in schools. The Change.org petition has already received well over 5,500 signatures in its first day.

Siegel told MSNBC, "We should step back and say, 'Why would we feed this to our kid?"

[ww1964]

Doesn't anyone ever do math? the lunch program feeds 31M kids, so this is about 1/4lb of slime per kid (over "several months.") Getting a hotdog at the ballpark exposes you to more "questionable meat" than that...

[hvshields]

Seventy percent of US hamburger contains up to 25% per pound of "pink slime" which consists of the slaughterhouse floor wastes treated with ammonia and water to kill E. coli and Salmonella bacteria.

The problem is, ammonia does NOT inactivate mad cow prions which may be part of the ankle-deep muck of blood, fats, tissue and scraps on the floor:

Slaughterhouses are required to remove "SRM" - specified risk materials- the parts of a cow with the highest concentrations of prions. SRM include the skull, brain,ganglia, eyes, tonsils, spinal cord and small intestine. Power tools, including chain saws, are used to cut up the carcasses.. It is unavoidable that potentially prion infected wastes from high risk tissues end up on the blood-soaked slaughterhouse floors - to be incorporated into the pink slime.

Alzheimer's is a prion disease - 6 million US victims. www.alzheimers-prions.com/ .

Pink slime is a likely pathway to deliver infectious prions to an unsuspecting public, including school children at risk for autism which is approaching epidemic proportions.. The Prion Institute in Alberta, Canada, is studying Autism as a prion disease

http://www.prioninstitute.ca/forms/WEBSITE%20AR.pdf


Helane Shields, Alton, NH [e-mail]

[Conservative08]

'Pink Slime' is a short story I wrote and published a couple weeks ago, that discusses much more of the issue than you see in the press. Available electronically from Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords, it is easily available and you can preview it. Just type in Pink Slime on any of those book sellers and it'll pop up. PinkSlime dot US is another route.

[cjsuccessteam]

I think all the major news networks are missing a VERY IMPORTANT POINT in this brewing controversy. Every news report I've seen over the last three days keeps pointing out that this product USED TO BE USED in items like pet food. My question is this: IF THIS PRODUCT IS MOSTLY BEING FED TO HUMANS CURRENTLY, PRECISELY WHAT MEAT-LIKE PRODUCTS ARE NOW BEING USED INSTEAD IN OUR NATION'S PET FOOD SUPPLY? There may be a lot of Americans who don't necessarily care about what government-approved food products they put into their mouths daily, but there are MILLIONS OF PET LOVERS IN THIS COUNTRY THAT WOULD RISE UP IN OUTRAGE IF THEY THOUGHT THEIR BELOVED PETS WERE BEING POISONED SOMEHOW. At one point in time Pet Food manufacturers were being (rightfully) accused of using roadkill and euthanized pets themselves (still with dangerous lethal drugs in their bodies) as part of the "meat by-product" label, from rendering plants that cook meat items at high temps to produce something far worse than "pink slime" for use in such items as pet food. Your story makes me even more certain that we did the right thing when we stopped feeding our pets manufactured pet foods over 10 years ago, instead feeding our Siberian Huskies only fresh (though inexpensive) meat items (like chicken leg quarters), and steamed rice, all of which our family prepares for our beloved pets daily. PLEASE ASK THE MEAT AND PET FOOD MANUFACTURERS WHAT THEY ARE PUTTING IN THE U.S. PET FOOD SUPPLY, NOW THAT PINK SLIME IS BEING FED TO THE PET OWNERS INSTEAD OF THE PETS? If you thought you saw outrage before, wait until the truth is shown to millions of pet owners, not only about what they are eating, but about what their pets are now forced to eat, because of what their owners are likewise being fed. I think the news media has barely scratched the surface of this controversy, and if you dig deeper it's just possible this entire domino-house of shady backroom dealings could collapse from the backlash of very angry consumers. Many Americans would literally lay down their own lives to save their beloved non-human companions. Remember the recent photo of the man who found his dog after the tornado? Please don't stop until you get to the bottom of this despicable tragedy of greed? There's more to this story than I believe you truly realize.

[AVRWEBGUY]

Soylent Pink for everyone! People, this isn't the first or only example of the masses being fed a bunch of processed bunk. The USDA does it, Congress does it, the media does it, Wall street does it... Help yourself to another helping of my heaping hospitality...

[Jaylah54]

Since I don't eat much ground beef anyway, I'm planning on buying an old fashioned hand-crank meat grinder and grinding my own from now on.

I prefer to know what's in the food I eat, and I don't consider "beef trimmings" that have been washed down with ammonia "food."

[Kaku2mom]

Grandpa's sausage, eggs, gravy and biscuits were not filled with color, preservatives, binders, hormones, texture, etc. that our kids are eating today. I'm waiting to see when the Feds (read USDA) will be more interested in protecting americans than pandering to growers and processors to maximize profit. Consumers should be able to make informed choices rather than unknowingly eat crap.

[fwd23515]

Hooray for the magic of capitalism, turning stuff that isn't food into something that seems like food.

I first learned to admire these job-creators when I read Upton Sinclair's 1907 book The Jungle, in which he described how slaughterhouses used "everything but the squeal" from pigs. Nothing's changed.

[ckp016c]

Yet we're all still alive! I get sick and tired of hearing about research after research contradicing everything. One research says it's good for you, another says it's bad for you, this one contains this, this doesn't contain this. What do we do when there's nothing you can eat or drink that doesn't kill you? I continue with what I've been doing for 53 yrs and I'm doing fine. My grandparents ate eggs, sausage, livermush, bacon, gravy, biscuits and every other thing else you can think of and they all lived to be in their 90's.

[m0u5y]

Nobody ever said pink slime was good for you. It's like saying fecal sauce is a healthy alternative to gravy.

[MarieAnne13]

The problem is, those selling the product are funding the "research" that says it's good for you; those with no ulterior motive are funding the research that shows it's truly bad for you. Your grandparents likely ate food that was far less-processed and chemical-laden than this.