The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the social class of who eats what.
Advanced meat recovery is the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating, allowing us to make use of almost every gram of edible meat on a carcass. If we're going to keep eating meat, we should celebrate advanced meat recovery in the same way that foodies celebrate unfashionable cuts or offal meat. We don't, because recovered meat is cheap and therefore has negative signalling value. The kind of people who buy grass-fed organic beef would never dream of knowingly eating "pink slime" or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that would otherwise go to waste.
Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean beef, because it is lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured beef, but it's widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily substituted by citric acid in this application. If you're concerned about health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to get more meat from every carcass.
(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)
It's not honestly lean beef. If it were, it would be red.
It's connective tissue, with a bit of lean beef mixed in. This has a different nutritional profile. There is less iron, and the amino acid proportions are different.
We could call it "pureed tendons, ligaments, defatted fat tissue, cartilage, lean beef, and ammonia or citric acid". That is a long and unwieldy name. The common name, known to consumers, is pink slime.
Yeah although calling it 'slime' is basically just trying to bring about associations with, for instance, rotting meat or vegetables (which often end up with a slimy texture) for the sake of shocking people and bringing in an audience of predominantly more well off people who "would never eat that".
So rather than give it a name which is deliberately off-putting it's probably better to give it something vaguely neutral and otherwise let it stand on its own merits, whatever they may be.
Regardless, we wrap literally everything else in shiny marketing nonsense. Using it to get people to eat the entire edible part of the animal rather than wasting it is kind of a win from an environmental POV. I mean arguably it'd be better if we just stopped eating meat, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.
Using "ground" to mean something that isn't actually run through a grinder, and "ground beef" to mean something the is created differently than what people have called "ground beef" is intentionally misleading. I honestly can't even imagine how anyone can see it any other way; it's baffling to me.
Again, that is not true. They are not cognitive tissues but beef. You could call it Processed Beef if you want, but it doesn't have a vastly different nutritional profile.
We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the social class of who eats what.
I wish this point was brought up more in nutrition discussions. Most of these recent fad diets like keto, paleo, and carnivore are beyond the means of most people in the world. So even if we accept, for the sake of argument (which I don't), that they have nutritional advantages there should be a giant asterisk at the end of the argument.
Fad not as in "something that will go out of fashion quickly", but as "of questionable value, that people pick out of peer suggestions/fashion". Whether the latter is recurring and long term doesn't mean much.
All kinds of non-diet fads come and go too, even bellbottoms made a couple of comebacks in the decades since the late 60s.
“Not a diet recommended for general use” can be legitimately said of many defined diets and can DEFINITELY be said of the actual eating habits of most western people.
Keto (i.e. any diet that triggers ketones) is a compelling option for numerous reasons, not just epileptics. It’s definitely not a good default for the wider population. And it is of course environmentally and economically inefficient. But ketogenisis is a reality of our biochemistry and shouldn’t be dismissed in the same way as other diets.
I agree. It’s true of many (all?) diets that its proponents tend to overestimate the applicability of any one diet to all people.
Dietary science is at its infancy. Contrary to what most people would assume, we have mountains of anecdotes, mountains of opinions, and very few hard facts. Navigating diet from a fact-first, science-first perspective is deeply frustrating.
yeah, it wasn't recommended because for treating epilepsy they were using a powdered meal replacement (like soylent) and were missing some essential ingredients like phosphorus.
it's absolutely a diet that can work for anybody, it does require a fair amount of reading though.
well maybe the reason it's growing in popularity is the fact that generally accepted medical and regulatory advice has been idiotic, focused on reducing fats and replacing them with sugars and carbs which resulted in obesity and diabetic epidemic?
that fad lasted for 50 years, taking that into account it's probably too early to call keto a fad - i barely meet people who even know about it, let alone practice rigorously for any prolonged amount of time.
A lot of people decided that LFTB was horrible stuff, based on no real evidence other than the fact that it's cheap. We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef. I'm not convinced that LFTB is sufficiently different to conventional minced beef to warrant specific labelling; we don't expect every ingredient to come with a precise description of how it was processed, despite the very substantial transformations that occur during e.g. flour processing.
Classism in food is absolutely endemic. A slightly facile but still important example is this paper from the BMJ in 2012. It analysed the nutritional content of 100 supermarket packaged meals and 100 recipes by popular British TV chefs. It found that the ready-made meals contained significantly fewer calories, less fat and more fibre than the recipes. We judge people for living on a diet of microwaveable meals, but switching to home-cooked meals might actually be a retrograde step in terms of nutrition if they follow the recipes of Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson.
Something feels intuitively wrong about that conclusion; that feeling is implicit classism.
>> We still have no real evidence that LFTB is materially less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered scraps used in minced beef
Except you're flipping the burden of proof. Food product experiments aren't default-safe until proven otherwise.
Class is a red-herring. Wealthy people eat pesticide-free, grass-fed, organic, bpa-free, healthier, or low-preservative fresh food not to signal, but because they are risk-averse.
All food labels should contain exact information on what the product is in these respects, next to the ingredients and nutrition information.
> we don't expect every ingredient to come with a precise description of how it was processed, despite the very substantial transformations that occur during e.g. flour processing.
I expect this, but I've been disappointed at how we are doing so far as a society.
What feels wrong is that "fewer calories, less fat and more fibre" doesn't more nutritious to me - it sounds like cardboard. There's a lot more to nutrition than the (harmful) "fat = bad" meme. In the general case, home-cooked food, made from raw vegetables etc, definitely isn't less healthy than processed food.
Nor do I understand the classism argument - cooking food from raw is enormously cheaper. Maybe it's different in America, but in the UK £10 worth of ready meals will feed you for a few meals, while £10 worth of judiciously selected ingredients will feed you for a week.
It's projection. The real class conflict in play here is that the meat that is well-established as safe and healthy for consumption - as far as meat goes - is only affordable for the affluent. Everyone else has to eat meat that is processed so as to obscure its origins and make it more primarily amenable to storage, transportation, and, ultimately, sale. And not primarily, you know, health.
The FDA have deemed LFTB to be safe. Several other regulators apply restrictions on the use of ammonia in food processing, but deem FTB processed using citric acid to be safe. Do you have evidence that putting beef scraps in a centrifuge to separate meat from fat is dangerous? Do you have evidence to show that the resulting meat is in any way less nutritious or less safe than conventionally recovered meat?
We know that many species of fish contain potentially toxic levels of mercury. The FDA advises pregnant and nursing mothers to avoid those species of fish to minimise the risk of brain damage to their child. Why is there no stigma about eating swordfish or marlin? Why does a plump, juicy, expensive fillet of bigeye tuna seem intuitively more healthy than a Filet O' Fish, when only the former contains hazardous levels of heavy metals?
Because it's tastier and less processed, more natural. How well that correlates with being healthy is another matter, but I really have no idea where you're getting classism. No one thinks "Mmmm, what an expensive piece of meat. I bet the poors can't afford it - I'm buying it!"
I've lived in poverty. Following poverty, I thought your straw man's thought. I'm pretty sure I said it out loud.
While living in poverty, I knew that more expensive meat was better tasting, and better for me. The pink-slime level of meat products I could sometimes afford caused unpleasant GI symptoms which unprocessed meat didn't. I learned to avoid the cheap meat products and experienced intermittent anemia instead. Even the raw ingredients of pink slime, like tendons and cartilage, cost an order of magnitude more than pink slime products, so I went without.
Lack of access to a minimally adequate variety of affordable nutrition is a class problem.
I must have expressed myself poorly. I absolutely agree that access to adequate nutrition is a class problem. What I disagree with is the notion that our food preferences are shaped mostly by considerations of class. I.e. that we desire certain foods because they signal that we are rich, not because they're tasty and healthy and 'natural'. I'm sure that might be true for some people, but not for the vast majority.
I just wanted to say I've found your comments throughout this thread to be valuable and thoughtful. Reminds me why it's worth my time reading HN every now and then.
Pink slime contains connective tissue and muscle. There's no way it's equivalent in terms of nutritional value to actual meat. And don't forget it's treated with ammonia, which is the reason it's banned in the first world.
The factor that dominates our conversations about food - social class. We have a set of reflexive attitudes about food that are largely uncorrelated with health, nutrition or the environment, but are strongly correlated with the social class of who eats what.
Advanced meat recovery is the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating, allowing us to make use of almost every gram of edible meat on a carcass. If we're going to keep eating meat, we should celebrate advanced meat recovery in the same way that foodies celebrate unfashionable cuts or offal meat. We don't, because recovered meat is cheap and therefore has negative signalling value. The kind of people who buy grass-fed organic beef would never dream of knowingly eating "pink slime" or mechanically separated chicken, despite the obvious environmental and animal welfare case for eating perfectly good meat that would otherwise go to waste.
Lean finely textured beef is no less nutritious than any other kind of lean beef, because it is lean beef. There are possibly legitimate safety concerns about the use of ammonium hydroxide in the processing of lean finely textured beef, but it's widely used elsewhere in the US food industry and readily substituted by citric acid in this application. If you're concerned about health, then argue about ammonium hydroxide, not about modern techniques to get more meat from every carcass.
(Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons)