>The "pink slime" story is mostly fake news. ABC News coined the term, and later paid $177 million to settle a lawsuit over it. It was the largest defamation settlement in the history of the United States.
I'd say this "beef" is fake meat -- whether some court agrees or not (that depends on who has the best lawyers and deeper pockets, not on who has the best food).
I'd be OK with companies being allowed to sell all kinds of crap as foodstuff, if they didn't highjack on existing food labels as it's the regular beef people know to fool consumers and paint a picture.
People have had so much trouble getting over words we use to describe food.
Clearly, when a normal person says "real" or "natural" or "doesn't have chemicals", they mean foods that are (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. This seems reasonable to me!
That's why it's okay to eat beef that someone used a machine to separate, but it's not okay to eat beef treated with ammonia. Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia!
This is reminiscent of the MSG scare. It was never about MSG as an underlying ingredient or racism (everyone loves Chinese food). As Wikipedia says, it's been a component of flavors "as early as 5,500 BCE." What changed is that it was manufactured industrially with "hydrolysis of vegetable proteins with hydrochloric acid to disrupt peptide bonds (1909–1962); direct chemical synthesis with acrylonitrile (1962–1973), and bacterial fermentation (the current method)." Its acceptance and rejection over time follows pretty much precisely how non-endogenous-to-nature the manufacturing process is.
I'm not making a value judgement if non-endogenous-to-nature foods are good or bad. I'm just saying I agree with you, and that it's actually really clear and easy to define scientifically what people mean when they say "natural" versus "fake."
It's just that science pedants are really stubborn. They parrot their "dihydrogen monoxide" and "chemicals" jokes and they don't really get that there's a long history of industrial, non-endogenous-to-nature manufacturing betraying consumers with nasty side effects, pollution and disease. It's really unempathetic to people and it's not good for real scientific goals, like reducing our impact on the environment and improving trust in science.
>Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia!
We are the only thing in nature that "produces" food - every other species photosynthesises, hunts or grazes. We're the only species that can cook. Is cooking unnatural?
>made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention
Where do you draw the line? Is wheat flour "unnatural" because we winnow off the chaff and grind the grains? Does a chicken leg become "unnatural" if you pluck it and skin it? Does milk become unnatural if you churn it into butter? Does butter become unnatural if you clarify it into ghee?
The whole distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is meaningless in any practical sense. Either everything we do is "natural" because we're animals, or everything that we do that apes can't is "unnatural". Either only a raw food diet is natural, or everything is natural. There's no logical distinction between the complex chemistry we perform in our kitchens every day and the complex chemistry that occurs in industrial food production, just a vague squeamishness.
Cooking. Frying or roasting produce diacetyl, acrylamide and all sorts of other potentially toxic substances that don't naturally occur in the food being cooked.
What about fermentation? The production of cheese or bread produces all sorts of chemicals that don't naturally occur in milk or wheat - are those chemicals "natural"? Does your opinion change if I told you that most monosodium glutamate is produced through industrial fermentation?
When people complain about non endogenous to nature processed foods, they don't bring up stupid as shit examples. It's a painful conversation, yes, because everyone has a hard time having a dialogue with moronic levels of pedantry. Maybe if you weren't calling cooking unnatural, and rather just talked about the merits of what people were really objecting too, it would be easier to communicate.
This isn't Science of Cooking. When you make food in your kitchen, you don't add ammonia to your foods. That's not vague squeamishness. People don't wash their vegetables in a chlorine bath. When they want to ripen their fruit, they put them in a closed container; they don't gas the fruit with a synthetically-derived hormone.
Even if these things are reconstructed exactly by an industrial process, you're not conceding that our definition of equality is enumerative. And funny enough, the reason poisons enter our food supply is that we say, "Well three ways these processes are equivalent are enough ways." "This complies with the regulation, so it must be safe." "We paid an auditor, who checked these boxes." Which in my opinion is the dumbest form of thinking of all. Sometimes, the slow and shitty way, for some intrinsic reason, doesn't harm you!
Obviously nobody is calling cooking unnatural, but if you see things so reductively, so pedantically, you're going to look back at the backflips you were writing years ago and really wonder how you missed the mark there.
> Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries.
Listen, I obviously didn't know that ammonia bicarbonate was used as a leavening agent for centuries, or that it was made from deer horns, or whatever. :)
Obviously, I also imagined that when a news article says they use ammonia on the beef, they mean ammonia gas (NH3). I don't fault anyone for thinking that either, like gentle John Oliver. Isn't that what they're saying?
I guess those are two different things, ammonia bicarbonate (the leavening agent) and ammonia gas (the thing they do with deer horns), and ammonia in fish (which is something complicated), or brie or something.
Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals, which is the exact thing you were passionately trying to avoid.
It really speaks to my point that these things are really difficult to communicate about, and full of traps, so forgive me for the audacity. It's not ignorance and bliss, there are a tremendous amount of people who can talk to each other about the line between cooking and industrial process in intuitive ways that are not at all poorly informed. Maybe not me personally.
> Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals
No, they are the same chemical for the purposes of this discussion. Any form of ammonia you eat -- whether ammonium bicarbonate or ammonium sulfate in bread, or ammonia residues in meat -- will be found as ammonium hydroxide in your blood. It's the same stuff. And the consequences of that extra ammonia in your body are precisely nothing. A ten ounce serving of pure pink slime (you know you want it) might give you a whopping hundred milligram boost of ammonia. That's 10 to 20 times less ammonia (nitrogen equivalent) than a typical adult pisses out every day.
My numbers in that comment are a bit off. I looked up my last blood test, and my UUN number was close to 20 g/day. This means that every day my body is producing two hundred times more ammonia than what you'd get eating a big pile of pink slime.
I'm taking pains in this thread to point out that I'm vegetarian, and even aside from that, I'd rather eat out of the trash than make LFTB a regular part of my diet. But that's not because of some imaginary risk from trace ammonia.
Can you tell me what the affect of dietary ammonia are on folks suffering from IBS/IBD? Food spends time in your body before it makes it to your bloodstream.
(I’ve got a kid that already avoids hard cheeses because it upsets him and bread for celiac reasons, so...).
Even at the highest levels allowed by the FDA, dietary ammonia is unlikely to have any noticeable effect. The tens of milligrams of ammonia your child would get from a large serving of cheese is insignificant compared to the ammonia produced by his own gut flora. And it's truly harmless compared to the the toxins he gets from an intestinal microbial overgrowth (such as a pylori infection) which may very well be the most prominent cause of intestinal disorders.
Even at higher levels than those allowed in food, I've seen no evidence that ammonia has any intraluminal effects beyond smooth muscle hypertonia. So even if your child somehow ingested more significant amounts of ammonia, for example from cleaning products, the worst symptoms will be some cramping. Note that I'm not talking about ingestion of concentrated ammonia, which is a corrosive hazard.
Think of it this way: if your child really was affected by dietary ammonia, you'd have to avoid a lot more than hard cheese. Foods containing more ammonia than pink slime include nearly all cheeses, cured meats, peanut butter, onions, mayonnaise, and others. If ammonia really was a problem then we'd all be pretty screwed.
My main point was: if someone is trying to be specific with their words, they start using scientific terms and take the romance out of the intuitive thinking, focusing on chemistry and physics. Food safety, nutrition, production is hugely complex, and therefore isn't intuitive.
Chiding someone for trying to be scientific as being pedantic and then complaining that it's so hard to communicate is really a contradiction of needs. I wish there was a middle ground , but to me OP wasn't even being all that geeky scientific or pedantic. He was stating fairly basic facts. Maybe a more gentle exposition is needed?
I'd suggest Googling "Dr Sarah Taber", she has some great twitter feeds and a podcast on the food industry, very eye opening stuff.
> (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical.
Agreed - it wasn't produced by "grinding beef" so it is not "ground beef". Processed, recovered, etc. would be fine. "Lean, Finely Textured Beef" was fine.
I wouldn't call "almonds steeped in water and filtered with vitamins added" "almond milk" either.
I'd say this "beef" is fake meat -- whether some court agrees or not (that depends on who has the best lawyers and deeper pockets, not on who has the best food).
I'd be OK with companies being allowed to sell all kinds of crap as foodstuff, if they didn't highjack on existing food labels as it's the regular beef people know to fool consumers and paint a picture.