AgriThoughts: "Pink Slime" - The Scientific FACTS

krippner:

gypsycowgirl:

I’m gonna go ahead and preface this with a warning- I’m a student of agriculture, which seems to be sort of a dying breed of people. I’m going to stand up for agriculture if given the chance, especially because the media coverage about it is generally based on no scientific…

The writer’s comments are indeed accurate. The stuff is safe to eat. The issue I have with the entire ‘pink slime’ thing is that people didn’t know they were eating it. The products being sold which used this material were being labeled as ground beef, and trying to call this ‘ground beef’ is a stretch by anyone’s standards. The term ‘ground beef’ implies that one takes beef, actual physical pieces of meat, along with a small percentage of fat, and grinds it coarsely to produce hamburger. In a lot of cases, not even the food services that were selling the ground beef in question knew that this was being mixed into the product.

What krippner said. Just because it’s safe to eat doesn’t mean we want to eat it. You could sterilize dirt and sell it as a good source of iron, but people are not going to buy it because it’s dirt and people don’t generally want to eat dirt. Tell people exactly what they are eating and leave it up to them to deside whether they want to eat it or not.

The fact that beef demand has gone down because of this is a good thing. We eat way more red meat than is healthy. Business must change to meet the demands of the consumer, and those businesses that cannot change fail. Being a farmer does not exempt someone from the supply and demand business model. Times are changing and those that refuse to change or cannot are going to fail, it is the hard truth of running a business.

Source: gypsycowgirl