Soylent Pink: Too Bad For McDonalds, But Good Enough for the Kids

Government Buying 7 Million Pounds Of Ammonia-Treated Meat For Meals

Pink slime -- that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade -- may have been rejected by fast food joints like McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King, but is being brought in by the tons for the nation's school lunch program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is purchasing 7 million pounds of the "slime" for school lunches, The Daily reports. Officially termed "Lean Beef Trimmings," the product is a ground-up combination of beef scraps, cow connective tissues and other beef trimmings that are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. coli. It's then blended into traditional meat products like ground beef and hamburger patties.

"We originally called it soylent pink," microbiologist Carl Custer, who worked at the Food Safety Inspection Service for 35 years, told The Daily. "We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."

Custer and microbiologist Gerald Zernstein concluded in a study that the trimmings are a "high risk product," but Zernstein tells The Daily that "scientists in D.C. were pressured to approve this stuff with minimal safety approval" under President George H.W. Bush's administration. The USDA asserts that its ground beef purchases "meet the highest standard for food safety."

As a chemist (or at least a very chemical literate biologist), the scare words "ammonium hydroxide" don't particularity frighten me.  There are lots of "chemical" used in food, some of which would be pretty awful if ingested straight.  Hominy, a corn product, is made by soaking corn in sodium hydroxide, or to use the common name lye, which is about as nasty a corrosive as one can imagine.  Food preservation techniques like that, and food additives to prevent microbial growth have saved literally millions of lives and made civilization possible.  If we had to eat food fresh, we'd essentially all have to grow our own, and what a disaster that would be!

I commend the HuffPo for at least making the effort to spread the misery around to the governmental sector.