The U.S. Department of Agriculture is going to feed the nation’s school children pink-slime?! The USDA purchased 7 million pounds of the “slime” for school lunches according to The Daily.
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Microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein doesn’t understand the motive of the USDA buying the slim explaining:
“I have a 2-year-old son. And you better believe I don’t want him eating pink slime when he starts going to school.”
It was Zirnstein who first coined the term “pink slime” after touring a Beef Products Inc. (BPI) production facility in 2002 as part of an investigation into salmonella contamination in packaged ground beef.
In an email to his colleagues shortly after the visit, Zirnstein said he did not “consider the stuff to be ground beef.”
Made by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally destined for dog food and rendering, BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings are then treated with ammonia hydroxide, a process that kills pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli.
The resulting pinkish substance is later blended into traditional ground beef and hamburger patties.
Carl Custer, a 35-year veteran of the Food Safety Inspection Service, said the idea of mixing in BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings into more nutritious, pure ground beef was itself problematic.
“We originally called it soylent pink, we looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.” Custer said.
Last year, the USDA said that 6.5 percent of the beef it purchased for the national school lunch program came from BPI. How can we be feeding our children this “slime”?
