I’ve got the subcutaneous fat sick blues. Why? Because I just discovered that my ground beef isn’t 100 percent pure hamburger meat. It now includes fatty trimmings from the outside of the carcass once thought unfit for human consumption and relegated to pet food and cooking oil.
Among other reasons, the trimmings weren’t used because the subcutaneous fat on the outside of a skinned carcass is one of the biggest breeding grounds for bacteria like e-coli and salmonella. Beef Products Inc., however, thought they had solved that pesky bacteria problem by injecting the processed trimmings with ammonia.
The USDA never conducted tests, even routine tests done on other meat sold as ground beef to the general public, on Beef Product Inc.’s beef, because they relied on studies done by the company proving the ammonia destroys bacteria like e-coli.
The processed trimmings, which resemble something like "pink slime" frozen to mask the smell of ammonia, are used by McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants, as well as grocery stores, prisons, and school lunch programs. The processed beef is added to regular ground beef to save about $.03 a pound. There have been many occasions where the product has to be sent back to Beef Products Inc. because of an overwhelming smell of ammonia. Luckily, the company has the policy of buying back meat the customer is unsatisfied with.
Ammonia, which naturally occurs in many foods, including beef isn’t going to cause too many problems, because the processed beef is intended to be mixed with regular ground beef. At issue here is how the USDA allowed Beef Products’ beef to be sent out to the general public – 5.5 million pounds to the school lunch program alone – without conducting tests. Many times this process has proved ineffective in treating the “mashlike substance” for bacterial contamination. Since 2005, Beef Products’ beef has been discovered to be contaminated three times with E-coli and 48 times with salmonella.
There were two back-to-back 27,000 lb recalls in August 2009. In July, the processed meat from a Beef Products’ factory in Kansas was temporarily banned from the school lunch program because of repeated citations for salmonella contamination. The food corporation Cargill suspended two separate Beef Products’ plants for excessive salmonella in the past year and a half.
The only way to avoid this processed and potentially contaminated meat-like substance is to know where your beef comes from. A good rule of thumb is to only purchase meat products (this includes chicken) that you can readily recognize as a certain part of the animal. If you need ground beef, have your butcher grind it to order for you. The USDA has revoked Beef Products’ right to independently test their own meat. It shouldn’t be worth the savings to feed this sort of thing to people, especially children.
Some may argue that this type of processing is better because it uses more of the animal rather than letting it go to waste. If this were true, however, the number of cattle slaughtered would have been proportionally less than before they began using the fatty trimmings when you adjust for annual consumption. It is no more than a method to make more money by using sub-par product.
In order to protect yourself from bad beef, know not only what’s in it, but where it came from and which slaughterhouse. You’ve got a right to know that information.
