Pink Slime is the result of industrially processing food.

Published 4.15.2012; reformatted 4.7.2013 and again on 8.11.2015
Bloomberg had a recent article on pink slime and its inventor, though the guy refused to be interviewed. It's an interesting read, and I have some sympathy for the guy. He was following the maxim "waste not, want not," took something everybody thought of as waste and created something (and quite a few jobs in the process) out of it. Unfortunately for him, I still don't want that stuff in my burger.

I think (as the story said) the ammonium hydroxide was an honest effort to get in front of the e coli issue. But let's face it, the e coli issue occurred because of industrial volume processing.

It comes down to the realities of industrial processed food. Processing food in mass quantities lowers the cost but lessens the quality and increases the risk of contamination. Americans like their food to be cheap, they just don't like to face what that requires and so don't ask too many questions. McDonald's would never use something like this in Europe or Japan— maybe in China they would. But food is more expensive in Europe and Japan— lot more expensive. And Europeans and the Japanese are must fussier about how their food is created— at least that's my impression. They ask questions and they demand their governments put regulations in place to guard against creativity like this. Because it was a very creative way to get something from nothing.

The beef industry really did get caught flat footed with this one— but they've never wanted transparency. All ground beef (hot dogs, sausage, lunch meat etc) is made of scraps— people making those must be hoping that this tsunami won't turn on them. It seems a bit incredible to me that none of those products contains the slime— or something worse.

As for the "puff" of ammonia hydroxide, you have to raise the pH of the meat volume high enough for long enough to definitively kill any e. coli that might be hanging out. Maybe you don't have to completely douse the meat with a liquid ammonia marinade, which is what Jamie Oliver did, but "puff" is surely euphemistic to the point of being deceptive. And probably well beyond.

Don't eat processed food, and you will never worry about pink slime.

Mass produced tuna implicated in salmonella outbreak

Published 4.16.2012; reformatted 4.7.2013 and again on 8.11.2015
Yellow fin tuna implicated in salmonella out break.

Yellowfin tuna product is the likely source of the Salmonella Bareilly outbreak that has sickened 116 across 21 states and has been linked to sushi, health officials announced Friday evening.Cupertino, CA based Moon Marine USA Corporation is voluntarily recalling 58,828 pounds of its "Nakaochi Scrape" - tuna backmeat scraped off the bones of the fish and sold in a frozen, ground state - after investigators pinpointed the product as a common food source among outbreak victims. The implicated food is not sold directly to consumers, but is usually served by retailers in sushi, sashimi, ceviche or similar dishes containing raw fish.

NOTE: This is only an implication based on circumstantial evidence, not the result of an actual test on the product itself.

However, it all comes right back to the problem of meat that is ground en masse and then distributed, to say nothing of highly processed "slimes" (of any color). It's best to keep the product as "whole" as possible (gutting not withstanding) until the last possible moment before cooking.

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