Welcome to the Jungle2.0

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Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby 82_28 » Tue Mar 09, 2010 11:18 pm

A little bit of an older article (Jan 2010), but here it is:

Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef

You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."

This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage," and turned into "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips".

Thus saving THREE CENTS a pound off production costs. And making the company, Beef Products Inc., a fortune. $440 million/year in revenue. Ain't that something?

And to emphasize: this pink slime isn't just in fast food burgers or free lunches for poor kids:

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Bush's U.S.D.A. also allowed these "innovators" to get away with listing the ammonia as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also OKd the processing method -- and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general public -- strictly based on the company's claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.

Because the ammonia taste was so bad ("It was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia," said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. "I’ve never seen anything like it.") the company started using a less alkaline ammonia treatment, and now we know -- thanks to testing done for the school lunch program -- that the nasty stuff isn't even reliably killing the pathogens.


But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

In July, school lunch officials temporarily banned their hamburger makers from using meat from a Beef Products facility in Kansas because of salmonella — the third suspension in three years, records show. Yet the facility remained approved by the U.S.D.A. for other customers.

Presented by The Times with the school lunch test results, top [U.S.D.A.] department officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.

The New York Times article today has a rather innocuous headline, "Safety of beef processing method is questioned."

I'd say this quote from the U.S.D.A. department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, who called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues, represents the situation better: "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."

I've been thinking about an action item on this issue, and I've got three ideas: a. write Michelle Obama through this web form: http://www.whitehouse.gov/... or snail mail: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500; 2. print out the NY Times article and give it to the manager of your local supermarket, and ask them if they sell any kind of ground beef that doesn't contain this "pink slime" or if their butchers will grind meat fresh for you; 3. just stop buying the damned stuff altogether.

© 2010 Daily Kos All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144904/


Yes, I hate Daily Kos. I just "liked" the de-evolution aspect of it. Right back where we started, except worse. And nobody knows how to do anything anymore. No, I am neither vegetarian or vegan either.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby Peregrine » Tue Mar 09, 2010 11:29 pm

Yeah, pretty nasty. I tend to loose my appetite for meat when I read stuff like this. This was discussed a little while ago in an earlier thread here, just fyi....
~don't let your mouth write a cheque your ass can't cash~
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby 82_28 » Tue Mar 09, 2010 11:34 pm

Whoops! Sorry.

Lets switch gears and make this thread about the deep meanings held within the poetry of this song then!



Best I can do. :partydance:
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby Uncle $cam » Wed Mar 10, 2010 12:52 am

What's with the mis-leading post title?
Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great; it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it.
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:04 am

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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby Uncle $cam » Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:33 am

Ahhh, okay, well after some skimming that explains it, I guess. However, I guess one would have had to had been in the know. In other words, have had read the book. My point being, I mean, I could have easily had written something as random as say, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. It would have been just as disconnected, unless you were familiar with Medieval and Renaissance magic.
Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great; it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it.
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby barracuda » Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:54 am

I got it right away, but then, I lived in Chicago, and rode the L past the stink of the Oscar Meyer factory every day for years.

I could never really eat a McDonalds burger without knowing deep inside I just swallowed the ground up bad parts of an alien sphincter. That's why they sell 'em avec du fromage.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby MinM » Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:05 pm

Pink Slime is Good for You | Disney Settles Defamation Case With Beef Products Inc.
jingofever » Thu Nov 05, 2015 8:58 pm wrote:I have seen the recent struggles of the fast food industry blamed on people wanting healthier food. How is it that people didn't realize that fast food was unhealthy? Is it pink slime they are afraid of? As Bill Maher said (about Taco Bell), "What do you expect when your meal costs less than gum?"

Apparently McDonald's is having trouble with their new all-day breakfast menu. And there was a hubbub about Burger King's black Whoppers. I don't know if it was good or bad hubbub but the Whoppers looked vile. It was interesting because it may be somewhat like how a sufferer of cerebral achromatopsia sees the world:

Mr. I. could hardly bear the changed appearances of people ("like animated gray statues") any more than he could bear his own changed appearance in the mirror: he shunned social intercourse and found sexual intercourse impossible. He saw people's flesh, his wife's flesh, his own flesh, as an abhorrent gray; "flesh-colored" now appeared "rat-colored" to him. This was so even when he closed his eyes, for his preternaturally vivid ("eidetic") visual imagery was preserved but now without color, and forced on him images, forced him to "see" but see internally with the wrongness of his achromatopsia. He found foods disgusting in their grayish, dead appearance and had to close his eyes to eat. But this did not help very much, for the mental image of a tomato was as black as its appearance.

Image
The tomato looks fine but that bun is ghastly. It was a Halloween promotion, after all, so they must have wanted its dead look.
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby 82_28 » Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:15 pm

Damn. I should have been more concise with the OPs meaning. Yes. Upton Sinclair.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby Burnt Hill » Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:45 pm

82_28 » Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:15 pm wrote:Damn. I should have been more concise with the OPs meaning. Yes. Upton Sinclair.


The Sinclair correlation was apparent to me, but, you lost me when you switched gears to GnR, as I could never stand Axl's constipated temper tantrum wails. I now have this vision of him spewing pink slime now that wont go away....
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Re: Welcome to the Jungle2.0

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Aug 12, 2017 4:01 pm

^^^ sometimes it's better not to share personal visions of revulsion. Have a nice day.
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