Unless
you live in a cave you must have heard all the uproar around the
addition of “pink slime” to ground beef in many supermarkets as
well as food establishments for some number of years. The main thing
that caused the uproar was the name of the product. Who wants to eat
pink slime? This product was used for many years under the name “lean
finely ground textured beef” and has been proven safe by government
testing as well for what has been reported as a twenty year history.
Plants have closed, jobs have been lost, and this will never be
reversed. The product was made from the lean beef left on trimmings
after the initial butchering process and for as long as I can
remember trimmings were used for grinding in supermarket operations
at store level. In this case a safe antibacterial agent containing a
form of ammonia was used and that scares people as well. For years
there has been injection of compounds in everything from hams to
turkeys as well as prepackaged hamburger being sealed off site in I
believe it is carbon dioxide inside packaging to avoid bacteria growth.
Why
this long winded piece about the above? Did you know changing product
names is common practice to help with product sales, just the reverse
of what happened here? How many of you order the exotic sounding
Orange Roughy when out for an evening meal? Did you know the name of
the fish until the 70s was Slimehead? It wouldn't sell, thus the name
change. What's the old saying.......A rose still smells the same by
any other name? Something like that. Enough for today.
Ken
Dillenburg