Ever heard of that stuff that they found in food from a very famous corporation ( that shall remain nameless ;) )? Well, If you've never heard of it, it is called...(drum roll please....) "Pink Slime". Basically, Pink Slime is a lower budget meat production not even close to a regular hamburger. The meat is described as " Boneless lean beef" or "Boneless lean beef trimmings" which in other words are the parts of an animals carcass that humans wouldn't normally consume. In fact, these parts would be used as pet food or household items like oil. Even worse, they use ammonia to kill all the bacteria on the meat.
The Government is paying MASSIVE amounts of money ($7 Mill) to have that meat used in school lunches (YUCK)!. What this shows us is that the government believes that buying organic, natural or even the real deal meat would be too costly for them so naturally they take the easy way out and pay a lesser amount for the garbage parts of the meat and feed that to us instead.
Now, If you hadn't known about these things you would still eat it correct? Better yet, will you be more wary of your choice of meal? I'm sure, that even after reading this, some of us will continue to consume this pink slime mess because it is readily available to us and its fast, quick and easy to get. We need to be more responsible about educating ourselves about the foods we are eating. If the government can take such an approach and see this as fit to do to the public it just proves that they don't care about our health and would care less if we get sick off that disgusting "meat". I would hope that after being found out, the government and whoever else is involved will clean up their act and do what is right for the people. The good news is that a lot of places are trying not to use it but if it has to do with ease and less cost i'm sure a lot still will.
LINKS:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pink-slime-for-school-lun_n_1322325.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime
http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/pinkslime-ammonia-ground-beef.htm
Honestly , pretty much everyone that read this won't change their diet . They may become grossed out but what can we do ? Lunch food in school can be avoided by bringing food from home or else where, however who's to say the food we bring to school isn't just as bad if not worse than the cafeteria food ? I know I'm about to say something that has been brought up a lot regarding this topic but that unhealthy strain of ecoli can be found in a lot of things due to careless preparation . Not to sound pessimistic or anything but if we continue to just sit back and research risks of eating the food we consume daily , nothing will change. It won't make people within the food industry any less money hungry . "pink slime" as we call it , is a matter of convince and lesser value like you said. Unless we fight this and stand up for the sake of our health nothing will resolve the issue at hand . Which leads me to ask ...where do we even begin to resolve this ?
ReplyDeleteComment Score: 18/20
DeleteGreat conversation happening here. I think that it is important to recognize the role the government plays in this. Nicco, you say that the government should get involved but how do you propose they fix this?
ReplyDeletePost #1: 27/30
I do agree that pink slime is very nasty and it sounds very unhealthy. I agree with what Maria is saying just because there's pink slime in the food that we eat daily doesn't mean that the people will change their diets and companies will stop putting pink slime and ammonia in our food to get rid of the bacteria. Many of the food that we eat today is very unhealthy even if the laws promises that it's healthy and inspected, but do you think that based on the economy and this capitalist society that the diet that is available for the people will change? Big corporations provide food for the people and free lunch for children because of the money they get not because the fact that they care about the people. As long as people don't fall over instantly because we eat pink slime or by having ammonia in our bodies, people won't change their diets and corporations will still continue. Unless a person has money to pay for organic food and "real meat" pink slime is probably their only choice of diet. Is there a way to lower the price of organic products so that it's available for everyone?
ReplyDelete"In point of fact, ammonia is naturally produced in the body — as a waste product. Ammonia is responsible for the odor of urine, which exists in part to ferry ammonia waste out the body."
"That said, because ammonia is a waste product, the body is very good at getting rid of it. Consequently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists ammonia as "generally recognized as safe" in the quantities used in pink slime. Ammonia is also found in puddings, baked goods, and other products. In fact, in a cheeseburger that contains pink slime, the cheese on top may contain more ammonia by weight than the beef patty."
Source:
- http://www.myhealthnewsdaily.com/2611-pink-slime-bad-health-beef.html
- http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/chapter-11-effect-pink-slime
Pink Slime has been a very controversial topic in the public today. I agree with what you had said about the "government" not having a concern for society's health. I can also add that the government's only interest is the money that they are making off of the cheap meat. They have no care that the boneless lean beef trimmings are contaminated with bacteria such as E. Coli and factory workers are killing the germs with ammonia. As stated in the article 'Pink Slime' Outrage... (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-04-20/business/35450766_1_pink-slime-afa-foods-lean-finely-textured-beef), "We’re taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest form for dogs, and after this process we give it to humans/ the USDA had not abandoned pink slime in school lunches." The U.S. Department of Agriculture buys millions of pounds of the meat and expect those outside and in school to use. Its contents are hurting the health of everyone. Besides the USDA, who do you think believes pink slime is acceptable and how do they benefit from its use?
ReplyDeleteI agree with this. In every meat that we get or order from a restaurant has this in it but we just dont know it. 7million of this is being produced on a daily basis. This has harmful bacteria, E coil, and pathogens inside of the meat, many peoples healths are on the line and the government does nothing to try and fix it. Becoming a vegeterian looks better and better by the day. Pink slim is manly used for pet food ! The government is basically treating us like animals. The government believes that the pink slime was approved for humans and that there is nothing wrong with selling this meat. "Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays." Thats not healthy especially to fed to children that was in past used for pet food. If fast food restaurants like Mc.Donalds and Burger King can stop selling pink lsime in there food, why cant the government do it ?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.change.org/petitions/tell-usda-to-stop-using-pink-slime-in-school-food
Tiara Dunn
Comment Score: 17/20
DeleteThis is insane how they are feeding this to students that are suppose to have one of the best diets to feed their brains that are still developing. Do you think this is something that has been happening recently or has been happening for awhile and we are just happening now? I think that this has been going on for awhile and we just found out about this. In the video we saw in class they stated that the meat industry is one of the cheapest industry in the USA. That is suspicious itself right there. Just because feeding the animals corn makes it cheaper doesn't mean that the whole meat industry should be one of the lowest in the USA. In the article Industrial Meat by Patrick Boyle he stated "It has a lot to do with efficiencies -- doing what we do even better and more efficiently; ... squeezing costs out of the process; adding value to the product. America in general is a tremendous food success story. ... We pay the lowest percentage of our per capita income on food than any country in the world. In the mid-1980s, it was about 12 percent. Today it's below 9 percent. And meat, which is a large part of our diet in this country -- meat and poultry -- is less than 2 percent of our disposable income. That's a great success story. We have high quality, reliable, abundant, and low-cost food in the United States. We're very fortunate." This was something that really open my eyes how meat is one of the biggest industry in our diets and it's only 2 percent of our income. It's crazy how low it is. I personally thought it was at least 10 percent of our income since it's something that is consumed so much in the USA. This is something that sounds really suspicious to me. Like you said Nicco we've to be more wise with what we eat and aware what's going on in the food industry especially the meat industry. Great post Nicco. It was very interesting
ReplyDeleteSource: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/industrial/consolidation.html
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI agree most people who buy burgers from restaurants don't know about the pink slime that is in their food. I feel as if that can be an issue , the fact that people don't know what their eating or they don't expect to find things like that in a restaurant so they don't look. But pink slime isn't the only thing found i read online somewhere that a lady found a bug in her sons chicken nuggets. Another is when someone found a dead frog in a diet Pepsi can but my question is how did that even get in their.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2012/09/most-disgusting-things-ever-found-in.html
Comment Score: 17/20
DeleteWhile I do agree that the government doesn't care about people and what they eat. I commonly hear questions like what should the government actually do about this? but if they haven't done much about it already, why would that change now? I personally believe even if we better educated people nothing will change because how will we ever really know what's in our food without watching what they do to it. We can't watch what they do to our food 24/7. And even if it did change how do we know it'll remain that way for ever? How can we trust the government to actually do something about it anyway knowing that this country operates on greed? Ultimately I believe there's nothing we can do about this because how can we simply believe they'll change this because we better educated people? We can't because the government has a bad reputation for lying. Its all about trust here in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteComment Score: 17/20
DeleteThis is a very true and well known fact. But now schools are able to opt out of pink slime but just because they have the choice to opt out doesn't mean they will. But a school in flushing, Queens which i wrote in my post choose to opt out of having pink slime also known as mystery meat in their school. The school 244 in flushing, queens choose to become an all vegetarian public school because of one of these very reason the pink slime. The school chancellor felt that children should be able to eat healthy and know what they are eating instead of eating mysterious things that they probably didn't know how got to their plate. And children are a bit oblivious to these kind of things so they need the protection of the adults so they won't consume the bad things the food industries disguise as something good for school kids to eat at lunch.
ReplyDelete-Iyona L.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/05/02/nyc-elementary-school-goes-all-vegetarian
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/queens-school-serves-all-vegetarian-fare-article-1.1331690
Comment Score: 18/20
DeleteAdults are oblivious too!
The fact that the United States is spending so much money on 'pink slime' instead of regular meat is astonishing. With all the money spent on meat why not use 100% real meat like how companies claim that they do. When you really think about what we're spending our money on eating it's a robbery. An article about the ingredients in our meat (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/04/us-food-ammonia-idUSBRE8331B420120404) it states that "Ammonia, known for its noxious odor, became a hot topic last month with the uproar over what the meat industry calls "finely textured beef" and what a former U.S. government scientist first called "pink slime". Used as a filler for ground beef, it is made from fatty trimmings that are more susceptible to contamination than other cuts of beef, and are therefore sprayed with ammonium hydroxide - ammonia mixed with water - to remove pathogens such as salmonella and E.coli." So the question for me rises why do we need to use ammonia in our food ? Why can't we just properly grow our food so therefor we wouldn't need any pink slime or extra things in our food, which in addition waste so much money ? I mean if the cavemen did it why can't we ?
ReplyDeleteI agree that is really disgusting like why would that even be legal to give to people at one point. Pink slime is ground meat gassed with ammonia to get rid of the E.coli strain it may be effected with. But good thing now that is not of issue anymore because it's been put to a stop. Pink slime is no longer alright to be sold to people. People have petitioned against to make it illegal for schools to have pink slime in their food. Because of all the petitions change has happened bring America one step closer to being safer food wise about the things we consume. Yay Pink slime banned, 1 battle won in the war to make the foods we eat safer.
ReplyDelete-Yamiliss Ramirez
http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-usda-to-stop-using-pink-slime-in-school-food
http://stoppinkslime.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0