Pink slime to make its way into school lunches: Debate ensues

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDMar 11 2012

McDonald's and other fast food chains may have removed “pink slime” from their foods but the ‘gooey’ sounding chemical treatment that removes bacteria from meat is still making its appearance at 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.

“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. 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.

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. “They've taken a processed product, without labeling it, and added it to raw ground beef,” Zirnstein said. Zirnstein toured a Beef Products Inc. production facility and later emailed his colleagues and told them he did not “consider the stuff to be ground beef.”

Pink slime is a mix of ground-up connective tissue and beef scraps that are normally meant for dog food. BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings are then treated with ammonia hydroxide to kill salmonella and E. coli, and mixed into ground beef or hamburger.

“We originally called it soylent pink,” Carl Custer, another microbiologist with the Food Safety Inspection Service, told The Daily. “We looked at the product, and we objected to it because it used connective tissue instead of muscle. It was simply not nutrionally equivalent (to ground beef). My main objection was that it was not meat.” When Custer expressed his concerns about pink slime, the USDA said it was safe. However, in 2005, it limited the amount of ammonia-treated LBT in one serving of ground beef to 15 percent. Zirnstein and Custer said pink slime is “a high-risk product,” so they wrote their own report, looking at the safety of it.