No, it’s the same product that has undergone additional steps to make it legal to serve to humans. The critical step is typically the application of ammonia, and less often, citric acid. Often the product is defatted prior to this step, but the only legal distinction is the use of a germicidal agent.
You keep posting this, but your own links are clear that this is false.
Mechanically separated meat is not allowed for human consumption specifically because of the danger of potential-prion-containing nerve tissue entering the product. Importantly, these prions are extremely difficult to deactivate, and thus it wouldn't make sense to allow this to be served to humans, no matter what further processing happened.
> A meat product known as “boneless lean beef trimmings” (BLBT) or “lean finely textured beef,” pejoratively referred to as “pink slime,” is often confused with mechanically separated meat, although it is produced by a different process. In order to extract pricer lean beef from less valuable, fattier trimmings, centrifuges are used to separate the fat out of the meat trimmings, and the resulting lean beef is then squeezed through small tubes, where it is exposed to a small amount of ammonia gas, producing a pinkish substance. Unlike MSM, lean beef trimmings are legal for sale in the U.S., although they are mixed in with other meat products (usually ground beef) and generally do not comprise more than 25 percent of the final meat products purchased by end consumers.
As far as I can tell, "mechanically separated meat" is meat that's been mechanically separated from bones by a grinding process. The prion fears are because some of the bone gets in, and some of the bone contains nerve tissue.
The article says that pink slime is instead made from beef trimmings, which does not involve that grinding process.
> The meat produced in this manner can contain no more than 150(±30) milligrams of calcium per 200 grams product, as calcium in such high concentrations in the product would be indicative of bone being mixed with the meat. Products that exceed the calcium content limit must instead be labeled "mechanically separated beef or pork" in the ingredients statement.
