Label The Pink Slime

In the excellent Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, there's a section on shit in the meat, and radiation treatment. [Food irradiation is one of those practices that I oppose yet I find many who also oppose it to be idiots.] As Schlossers argues, the reason beef processors would like to irradiate at the end of their lines is so they can crank up the speed of processing, spray shit everywhere, but have the safeguard of killing all the [literal] crap that makes it in.

If we're not going to irradiate the shit out ground beef, what else can we do to it? How about inject some ammonia into it? A processing company had the genius idea of taking the "pink slime" that would normally be relegated to pet food or industrial by-product status, injecting it with ammonia to kill colonizing pathogens, and mixing it into their ground beef, making it cheaper. Not that different than shovelling the scrapings off the factory floor into the sausage-mixing barrels.

The USDA approved this practice. Naturally, they approved it by accepting the company's own study that the process is effective. That's not the really bad part. The inexcusable part is this: they don't have to mention on the label that they've injected the pink slime with ammonia and stuck that in your burger. 'Federal officials agreed to the company’s request that the ammonia be classified as a “processing agent” and not an ingredient that would be listed on labels.' The company asked the feds to not make them list ammonia as an ingredient, and the feds complied. The government is not acting in the public interest. Who is your government working for? Not for you, clearly.