Later I read more reports about pink slime with amazement. Something seemed strange, all the so-called reporters were mostly linking back to articles written around 2009. Very little new information is to be found in their footnotes, such as tours of the facility, or interviews with people who actually work at Beef Products (BPI)
So I want to think about some things.
1. Connective Tissue: Because I believe it could be scientifically proven either true or false, I believe sinew and other connective tissue is not used in the lean beef trimmings product of BPI. I am not saying there's no way it can get into ground beef period, because what happens later at the butcher shop is not under control of the company. The equipment used by BPI to remove the bits of lean muscle not previously get-able by hand has a thing called a de-sinewer, which they report reduces the overall yield, increases the quality, but increases the cost. See highlighted area below. Also, based on my own experience, connective tissue such as tendon (is that connective? I don't know, I'm just going out on a limb here!) is used by cultures other than America in their food. I eat it myself. I eat tendon and tripe in my Pho, cooked in a Vietnamese restaurant, and served with a variety of herbs and sprouts, all of which (the herbs and sprouts) I am more worried about having e coli on the herbs and sprouts.
Furthermore, connective tissue is everywhere, even in your lovely steak. Here is a website explaining how to make it more tender, if you so choose.
Here is the discussion of marbling according to the Asian Australasian something something err... the Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Science...
Effects of Marbling on Meat Quality Characteristics and Intramuscular
Connective Tissue of Beef Longissimus Muscle
Asian-Aust. J. Anim. Sci.
Vol. 19, No. 12 : 1799 - 1808
December 2006
Because ya know, When China Talks, People Listen. Oh wait, that's E.F. Hutton.
Click here for some other foreign opinion on fat and other tissue in the flavor category and what consumers want. They have some nice photos. Blue- connective tissue. Go ahead and figure a way to completely remove it without the BPI process.
2. Ammonia is used to produce a pH between 8 and 10 are what the beef trimming product is exposed to. In my lifetime I personally have never noticed an ammonia odor in my ground beef, which truthfully I only purchase about twice or three times a year, but I do purchase the absolute leanest available, which is almost guaranteed to have contained this product lean beef trimmings. Actually I have found ground turkey to be slimier than ground beef. I also only purchase that about one or two times a year. And I'm still alive, as are my children.
3. School Children: I have three school children. Other people routinely feed their children sodas, all of which contain chemicals I can't pronounce, and I do not. Other people routinely feed their children things like energy drinks. Bad stuff. Other people routinely feed their children absolute crap. Sometimes my kids eat crap too. Mostly they eat vegetables and chicken breast I cooked myself, with an occasional Tony's Pizza from the frozen food section. Also cereal. People, cereal has no real place on a breakfast table, nor so pop-tarts, and really, why is that not as bad as this current ground beef fiasco????? Why are people not more outraged over the pesticides in their strawberries? Or the pesticides in the grapes in school lunches? I eat at school! I am not the least bit grossed out over anything but the so called mac and cheese which looks suspiciously like pale yellow brains.
Oh I had another thought
4. Frugality. Here is a link to a United Nations ag organization document
The thing is, according to this article, by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, (FAO) there are 300 muscles in the animal. According to BPI, their mechanical process gets more than 25 of them, and they don't need to be a single muscle, because hamburger just isn't. (There's our connective tissue again.)
Here is a quote from the document I linked to for #4
" The chief edible and nutritive portion is the muscle or lean meat. The muscle is seldom consumed without some of the attached fat and connective tissue.
The lean of each meat animal carcass consists of about 300 individual and different muscles of which only about 25 can be separated out and utilized as single muscle or muscle combinations. The separated muscles are not all the same. They vary widely in palatability (tenderness, juiciness, flavour) depending on the maturity or age of the animal and the body location from which they were taken."
Sooooooooooooooo this is what I think. The so-called reporters are not using current facts.
3000 jobs, including the ones in my town, are at risk of being lost over something we've been eating for years.
Don't Americans realize that food production involves some things we don't know? Friends of mine have absolutely quit eating pork because of video footage of how hogs are treated pre-slaughter, because they believe that piggies are as smart as dogs, and honestly I believe it too. But, I still eat pork.
Is ammonia (something found in the human body naturally)somehow worse than feeding our children pesticides in the grapes in the school lunch? Pesticides creep me out more. They cause cancer. Ammonia does not. I am also aware that chlorine bleach in small amounts is used in vegetable prep for restaurants. Oh and in water, chlorine is commonly used to decontaminate. Right? Right.
Anything Eldon Roth or anyone tries to say in defense of BPI's process is met with derision. Using Facebook, I attempted to communicate with a blog author whose page and links to other non-pink-slime web articles I have read. I attempted to provide information which I believe to be correct, mentioning my consumption of tripe and tendon in Pho, to a blog author I have previously thought of as rational and having her head on straight. She wrote back:
"No. Pink slime can not, in any way, be compared to offal. Your offal isn't covered with ammonia. Your offal is far more nutritious. Your offal carries nowhere near the bacterial risk of pink slime. I find the comparison hilarious, and the fact that you're linking me to information from the company's website - as if they're not afraid of this media storm resulting in them being shut down - is laughable and has no place on my page."
I could not find one link with any reference to interviewing an actual human that works currently at BPI, nor did she describe the process by which the product is produced.
Because I believe it could be scientifically proven either true or false, I believe sinew and other connective tissue is not used in the lean beef trimmings. I read this earlier this weekend and have been looking nonstop for this info which I finally found a link from the New York school system.
Also found here: Food Identity Theft Website the following is actually a history of operations from BPI
Boneless Lean Beef
Trimmings
USDA has announced it will permit
schools to select whether the products they purchase contain boneless lean beef
trimmings (BLBT). In marking this
decision, three basic questions need to be answered:
- Is it meat?
- Is it nutritious?
- Is it safe?
The answers to above are yes,
yes, and yes.
To understand why the answers are
yes, it may be helpful to understand BLBT’s origins and evolution.
Beginning in the 1960’s, meat
companies sought to increase the amount of lean meat obtained from the
carcasses through the development of new processes.
One potential source of
additional meat was the lean meat woven within the fat that could not be
economically recovered through normal knife trimming. Therefore, the industry began to look for
other practical methods to harvest this lean tissue.
To recover this lean, beef
companies developed equipment to separate this lean tissue by a physical
process.[1] This separation process ultimately led to
BPI’s BLBT.
To separate lean meat from fat, USDA
inspected and passed beef trimmings with at least 12% visible lean would be
heated to a low temperature (less than 120º F).
This would result in the liquefaction of fat. Then, by means of a centrifuge, the lean meat
would be separated from the fat.
When initially developed, the
product produced by the separation process was below the standards of beef trimmings
derived by hand both in terms of nutritional quality and appearance. The nutritional quality of the early product was
affected by the presence of lower-grade proteins (connective tissue) that were
in the trimmings and stayed with the lean meat during the separation
process. Appearance was affected by the
temperature needed to liquefy the fat.
The products resulting from this process are known as “partially
defatted chopped beef” (PDCB) and can be used in a variety of products, such as
beef patties, pizza toppings, meat balls and chili. PDCB is labeled as beef, but may be limited
to a percentage of the meat in the total product, e.g., (beef patties - no limit, chili - 25% of meat in the product).
In the early 1980’s BPI entered
the market by producing PDCB. However,
BPI was not content with simply producing PDCB; it wanted to improve the
product quality. By building its own
equipment, it was able to address and eliminate the nutritional and product
quality and shortcomings of PDCB.
By designing and installing a
“de-sinewer[2],” BPI is
able to remove the connective tissue from the lean meat prior to separation of
the meat from the fat. Through this removal, BPI increased the
protein quality from less than the 2.0 protein efficiency ratio of PDCB to over
2.5. This step has made the final
product comparable to hand derived trimmings.
Even under the newer Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score,
BPI’s product is equivalent to other beef trimmings.
As to the overall appearance, BPI
was also able to improve the separation process. The temperature necessary for separation is approximately
the same temperature of the carcass at time of slaughter (~ 105º F). By reducing the temperature, the product’s
appearance is improved.
Based on the changes BPI
implemented, its lean meat derived from the trimmings is not only superior to
PDCB, it matches hand derived trimmings.
On the basis of this, USDA permitted the use of BPI’s product in ground
beef in 1990. USDA also recognized a new
name for the product, lean finely textured beef.
When pathogens were identified as
an emerging public health concern in the 1990’s, BPI began sampling its product
for E. coli O157:H7, the only
adulterant in raw products. To this day,
BPI’s sampling program, of one sample per 60 pound box, takes more samples per
pound of product than any other sampling plan in industry. Notwithstanding this robust testing, BPI’s
positive incidence rate for E. coli
O157:H7 was below the rate for beef trimmings generally, negating any inference
the raw materials are more highly contaminated.
However, testing only prevents
shipment of adulterated product, it does not prevent the adulteration. BPI, though research, determined that the
rapid adjustment of beef’s pH, followed by a quick freezing and stress, could
destroy pathogens, such as E. coli
O157:H7. BPI selected ammonium hydroxide
to adjust the pH because it is in wide spread use in the food industry as a
GRAS ingredient (generally recognized as safe) and it is a natural constituent
of meat.[3] Through scientific studies, this pH
intervention has been demonstrated to reduce E. coli O157:H7 levels and was recognized by USDA in 2001. To distinguish this product, BPI developed
the name “boneless lean beef trimmings” or BLBT.
In the last year, BPI has
finished its most recent validation of its pH process. Also, it became only the second company to
test its products for non-O157 STEC, pathogens similar to E. coli O157:H7 and which will be deemed adulterants by USDA on
June 4th of this year.
This history puts the facts
surrounding BLBT into context and supports the answers to the three core
questions:
- BLBT is meat
- BLBT is made from raw materials that are meat. These raw materials are also used for other meat products for the consumer.
- BLBT is produced by a process designed to remove lean from the fat more efficiently than could be derived by hand trimming.
- Other meats from the separation process have has been in use for dozens of years without separate labeling of the resultant product.
- BLBT is nutritious
- BLBT has the protein quality of meat due to the use of the de-sinewer during processing.
- BLBT has the nutrients commonly associated with other meat: protein, iron, zinc and B vitamins.
- BLBT is safe
- It is treated with a pH intervention using a GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) substance in use throughout the food industry.
- The pH intervention process has been repeatedly validated to reduce pathogens on the product.
- BPI verifies the intervention through a robust finished product sampling program.
Cost Benefits
Given the answers above, BLBT also
makes sense from an economic perspective.
It enables the recovery of approximately 30 pounds of lean meat per
animal and costs less than any other meat with the same lean content. According to Cathy Schuchart, vice president
of the School Nutrition Association, “this will assist schools in meeting the
provisions of the dietary guidelines dealing with fat content of school meals
at a lower cost.”
[1] Companies also sought to recover lean meat
remaining on bones following trimming.
The product resulting from the process of mechanically separating meat
from bones is known as mechanically deboned meat (MDM) and meat from Advanced
Meat Recovery systems (AMR). The
separation process used by BPI cannot use bone-in raw materials and BPI does
not permit MDM or AMR as raw materials.
Accordingly, BLBT is not MDM nor AMR.
[2] It should be noted that the de-sinewer reduces the
overall yield of the process, so while it increases the quality, that increase
comes at a cost.
And while I'm at it, why are hamburgers being held to a higher standard than hot dogs?????
1 comment:
This is a breath of fresh air - thanks for laying it out like that. The tribal reaction seemed a little too hysterical to be based on provable facts...
Post a Comment