While on the subject of hamburgers, Adam Ozimek takes on the sentimental sloganeering about “pink slime” and makes the case for getting more food out of each cow, quite aside from the safety advantages of the stuff.
Commenter Jesse Spurway: “I guess head cheese and scrapple are next on the hit list.” More: Andrew Revkin, NYT; Greg Conko, CEI.
11 Comments
this whole deal is funny. I guess head cheese and scrapple are next on the hit list. I can foresee labels on the salad dressing I buy, which already has “gluten free” on the label, will now have “pink slime free” too.
Head cheese and scrapple are traditionally not made from animals that have been subjected to an unwholesome diet and inhumane living conditions and unclean butchering conditions. Nor do they necessitate a heavy dose of chemicals to kill the bacteria created and spread by this sickening abuse of animals.
I love meat – but it just ain’t right to abuse animals in the way our meat industry abuses them. There should be a minimal standard of humane care when you are raising and slaughtering animals, not necessarily required by law, but rather by one’s own conscience.
And that has what to do with this issue, A Critic?
I have no problm with Pink Slime, as long as it is not classified as meat, but as meat byproducts. There’s all sort of crap in sausages. You don’t want to know. But it is not unhealthy; we’ve been eating it for millenia.
But I want to know if it’s in my ground chuck.
Sadly, for much of the actual target demographic, “gluten free” products are not a choice, they are a requirement. For me and others with Celiac disease (and possibly those with gluten intolerance) gluten is essentially a poison when ingested. It triggers an autoimmune reaction in our GI tract that causes damage to the villi in the small intestine that leads to a whole host of other problems (including a radically increased chance of developing many kinds of cancers). Gluten also happens to be in a huge amount of processed foods, even when it is not a necessary ingredient. It is in things like malt flavoring and extract, in some types of caramel coloring, can be introduced by cross contaminated oats, numerous other ingredients, and sometimes even by there being a gluten filled production line next to where “gluten free” products are being made…
Believe me, I wouldnt be gluten free if I didnt have to be…its not a choice for me… Pink slime free…well, I probably would choose to be free of that but it doesnt look legitimately dangerous to anyone’s health.
@antiredistributionist
It has to do with why pink slime is being produced instead of headcheese.
There’s another outrageous outrage wrt pink slime: the misappropriation of Taxpayer resources by vocal, crazy parents.
NY Times and other ran articles about schools that won’t be using meat they’ve already purchased.
As a Taxpayer, I am extremely offended that some parents with a petition who saw a picture on the Internet can get a Government entity like a school to waste my hard-earned tax dollars.
These parents should offer to buy the pink-slime from the school and replace it with something at no cost to Taxpayers.
@A Critic: I’ve no trouble at all finding head cheese, scrapple, and even souse in my markets. Pink slime hasn’t conquered all, apparently.
I like Jamie Oliver’s bit about showing kids how chicken nuggets are “made” (he does at least have the decency to admit that this is not in fact how chicken nuggets are made) by taking a chicken carcass with all its’ little scraps of meat and blood and bone marrow and connective tissue and giblets and making “pink slime” out of the carcass which he then makes into little chicken nuggets. After the kids are not-so-subtly induced to refer to the process of making pink slime as gross and horrible and disgusting and “bad”, Oliver is shocked to discover that the kids want to eat this nasty stuff anyway.
His determination? Kids have been brainwashed into believing that eating scraps of meat and blood and bone marrow and connective tissue and giblets isn’t bad and we must do something to teach children that they are wrong.
Now, I am not saying that eating a skinless baked chicken breast isn’t healthier for you than eating fried chicken nuggets, but human beings for thousands of years have been making efficient use of livestock specifically by making delicious, nutritious dishes out of scraps of meat and blood and bone marrow and connective tissue and giblets. It’s called food.
(So too are parts of animals even less esthetically pleasing than the ones Jamie Oliver was using – he started out with a commercially prepared “chicken” – the ones you buy at the store that seem to have mysteriously misplaced their heads and feet and entrails. There’s some good eating there as well.)
Your “explanation” is even more confused than your original post, A Critic.
As a middle child in a family with 6 kids, I ate chicken a lot while I was growing up. My favorite part was the “Pope’s nose,” the part that goes over the fence last, the tail. In a sectioned, roasted chicken it contained the best tasting meat – the “oysters” – and the best tasting thing of all, the crunchy tail skin and meat. I have trained my own kids to appreciate the more gourmet sections of their chicken, as I was trained, through taste testing.