Slimed!

The term “slimed” first became popular in 1984 when the movie “Ghostbusters” was released.  Written by Dan Acroyd and Harold Ramis, starring them and Bill Murray, it was a blockbuster movie for the times.

Nickelodeon, the kid’s TV channel has also made “being slimed” a signature part of some of the shows it airs, using a green goo as the slime.

When I was a kid, growing up near the Everglades in south Florida, we were often fascinated by the slime left by a snail as it wandered to wherever snails wander. There was also the slime of a big, juicy earthworm as you speared it on a fishing hook as bait for one of the large catfish we would catch in the Hillsborough Canal that ran behind the house.

One of the things we learned as kids was that slime was nasty. It was icky. It might be fun to smear on someone else, especially your little sister, just to watch her squirm, but anyone that had the common sense of a fence post knew that slime, in all it’s various forms, was not something one ate willingly.

Dan Gainor over at Fox News has posted an opinon piece on how ABC news went out of it’s way to damage the reputation of Beef Products, Inc. for their part in the recent “Pink Slime” scandal.

For those of you who have spent the last month or so living in a tent in the desert without benefit of news, “Pink Slime” is a food product marketed by a company named Beef Products, Inc. It’s marketed as “lean, finely textured beef”, and according to Gainor, is simply beef that is ‘just harder to get at, so the meat isn’t lost’.

Microbiologist Gerald Zernstein, who named the product “Pink Slime” back in 2002, and Carl Custer, another microbiologist who works for the Food Safety Inspection Service agree that the stuff isn’t “meat” and that the connective tissue and gristle that comprises a good percentage of it is not nutritionally equivalent to muscle.

Apparently, Undersecretary JoAnn Smith from the George H.W. Bush administration, who once served as president of the Florida Cattlemen’s Assocation and the National Cattlemen’s Association made the decision that this product was “meat”, and under current labeling laws, a product with up to 15% of this “Pink Slime” doesn’t even have to list it on the label.

Adding insult to injury, this vile mixture of cartilage, gristle and other “beef parts” that we normally would not eat, or would use for dog food, is irradiated with an ammonia gas, just to make sure anything bad for us is killed off first.

In his article, Mr. Gainor spends a considerable amount of time explaining that the reason this product is irradiated with ammonia gas is to prevent the transmission of e-coli bacteria. We all know how dangerous that bacteria can be, but if we weren’t being forced to eat this unlabled product that is hidden in what we think is “hamburger” in the first place, then we wouldn’t need to worry about bacteria, would we? I never heard of a T-bone steak or a Filet needing to be sprayed with ammonia before being sold, and if, as Mr. Gainor claims, this product is truly “beef”, then what is the difference?

As seems typical in many of the articles and stories on the Fox network, Mr. Gainor is one sided, so much so that it makes you wonder what his connections to the beef industry might be?

NPR has a more balanced story, and explains how the Pink Slime isn’t a whole lot different in some ways than some of the highly processed deli-meats that we eat, such as sliced deli-ham. Those meats also include a signifcant portion of “trimmings”.

The NPR article does include more scientific fact though, and cites an analysis that shows that the Pink Slime does contain 2.5 times more insoluble protein relative to ground chuck, and while our gut will digest it, it is likely to be of less nutritional value to our bodies. The plus side of this stuff is that it does contain less fat.

It doesn’t matter if you call it “lean beef trimmings”, or Pink Slime. What matters is that an Undersecretary of the USDA behaved in an unethical manner, causing this stuff to be allowed to be present in our food without being properly labeled. Without being properly labled, we consumers cannot make an educated choice on what food we wish to purchase. That’s what matters. 

It’s still icky.

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