Pink Slime: (More) History and A Dollop of Sermonizing. Part Two

Part One --- Part Three --- Part Four --- Part Five 

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The MSM (mechanical) process fell out of favor in the 1980s: Pork and beef packers were reluctant to use it, and for the same reason they were reluctant to use irradiation: They feared consumers would regard the product as unsafe.

But the idea was sound --- use those scraps --- so inventors developed other ways to “salvage” scraps without getting bone into the mix. These people, who included a scientist at a Nebraska university, created a second generation of the “separation” process. 

Among them was Eldon Roth, who founded BPI, Inc., the company at the center of the current controversy. Roth is a natural engineer: despite lack of formal training, he devised ways to use, process, and preserve meats in innovative ways, and designed the machinery needed to carry out those processes. (*1)

Roth’s method for utilizing scrap meats consisted of subjecting the carcass to very high pressure water bath; the pressure scrubbed the carcass clean of all meat, sinew, etc. without taking any bone with it. Then he ran the scraps through a “desinewing device for the removal of virtually all non-functional material such as cartilage, bone chips, connective tissue, and sinew.” (*2) 

Next the material was subjected to “a modified centrifuge” that eliminated most of the fat, leaving muscle (protein) behind. (*3)

The resulting meat matter, which was 94% lean, was flash frozen (a process that takes about 90 seconds), chopped, pressed into a block form, boxed, and shipped to other packers, who incorporated it into their ground beef.

(Roth himself was not a beef processor. He didn’t slaughter animals. Instead, he bought carcasses from other meatpackers and only used those that he deemed to be safe, free of contaminants, and so forth.)

The problem with these second-generation processes was e. coli: The more a carcass is handled, the more likely that some of the bacteria in the carcass will migrate out of the intestines and collect on blades or on parts of the carcass.

What to do? Roth came up with (another) ingenious solution: In its natural state, beef contains ammonia and has a certain pH level. By elevating the pH level, he could kill bacteria. He ran the meat stuffs through a “blender” “where nH3 [was] added to form ammonia hydroxide, which elevate[d]d the pH levels in the finished product.” (*4) (*5)

I gather that Roth needed a fair amount of trial and error to get the level right: enough to kill bacteria, but not so much that the meat smelled like ammonia. (Apparently that was a problem in the early days of this method.) Think of this as the grandchild of the original MSM process.

If you’ve been tracking the current controversy, you know that many people are bothered by the ammonia part of the equation. Bare minimum, most people don’t understand what it is. I gather we can thank Jamie Oliver for that.

During an April 2011 segment of his TV show, he told viewers he wanted to show them what he “imagined” packers did in their plants:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wshlnRWnf30

If you don't want to watch, here's a summary: He shoved hunks of beef carcass into a washing machine to demonstrate the “centrifuge” process. Next he dumped “rendered” meats into a container, added liquid ammonia, and then told the audience that’s what packers were doing to the stuff. All the while, he was explaining that the original product was “inedible.” Not safe for humans. 

Oy. So far off the mark that it’s not even funny. And, alas, why so many journalists and bloggers keep referring to beef scraps being “dunked” in ammonia. It’s gas, folks. Gas. Not liquid. And many foods, both “natural” and processed, contain ammonia. Eat onions? You’re eating ammonia. Eat cheese? Ditto. Eat grass-fed, “organic” beef? It contains ammonia. So do many PROCESSED foods.

As for Oliver’s claim that PS begins with parts of the animal that are unsafe to eat, well, that’s simply not true.

Also, and for what it’s worth, BPI, Inc. has been lauded for many years for its devotion to sanitation and safety: the conveyors belts, for example, are outfitted with top and bottom sprayers to sanitize the belts constantly. Even the air in the plant is scrubbed and sanitized.

Next: Testing and food safety

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*1: For a time line of BPI’s history, see this report by James Andrews in Food Safety News. Andrews’ work is reliable. He’s one of the few “food” reporters out there who focuses on facts rather than innuendo.

*2: Brent Langman, “Creating Food Safety Through Innovation,” National Provisioner 216, no. 4 (2002): 26.

*3: Ibid.

*4: Ibid. 

*5: I have not seen the patents for the ammonia gas process. I don't know who "invented" it --- but am assuming that Roth developed a specific, and efficient, way to use the "idea." I'm confident that if I had the time to read through university research reports, or ag experiment station bulletins, I'd find evidence of someone somewhere developing the idea of doing this. Roth then (I'm betting) developed a way to make the idea viable on a large scale. He's a smart, inventive guy.

Pink Slime: (More) History and A Dollop of Sermonizing. Part One

Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4 --- Part 5 

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This is the first of five blog entries aimed at adding background to the “pink slime” controversy. I spent a couple of days digging around for more information, and what I learned may (or, hey!, may not) be worth knowing. As always, my aim is to make your reading easy, so I’ve broken this into several, bite-sized (no pun intended) parts.

Part of my goal is to correct a MAJOR mistake I made in my first “pink slime” post: I wrongly equated the method used to make “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB), aka Pink Slime, with “mechanically separated” or “mechanically deboned” meat. I apologize for that mistake. (*1) Haste does indeed make waste and error, too. In this case, happily, my error does not affect my conclusion. (Yes, all this will make sense in a moment.)

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use abbreviations: LFTB for the “pink slime” process, and MSM for the “mechanically separated” process. They’re not the same thing; LFTB is the grandchild of MSM. 

As I noted in my initial PS blog entry, beef and pork packers started using MSM in the mid-1970s, when they were trying to keep meat prices low at a time of extraordinary economic turmoil. The process allowed them to utilize meat scraps that were otherwise going to waste.

The problem with MSM was the “deboning.” Packers used blades/machinery to scrape carcasses clean of meat scrap. They “salvaged” lots of otherwise unused protein, but bits of bone got into the mix. Those bits were crushed when the scraps were mushed together and pressed through sieves.

These bone fragments hardly deserve the name of either “bone” or “fragment”: They were the size, texture, and consistency of pepper flakes, the kind that comes out of a shaker. Translation: not dangerous to anyone.

Unfortunately, others didn’t see it that way. Originally, the USDA insisted that any labels for the stuff contain the words “ground bone.” Packers balked; the USDA backed down; and in 1982 established new rules that allowed them package and sell the stuff without mentioning the word bone.

Then consumer advocates objected and took the USDA to court. At the time, consumer advocates were less worried about bone fragments than they were about the mineral content of the bone, arguing that people with some diseases have to monitor their intake of minerals, especially calcium, and so the product needed to be labeled accordingly. In late 1984, a US Court of Appeals ruled that the USDA’s new rules could stand. (Historical tidbit: Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion.)

Next: The search for an alternative

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*1. As anyone who knows me, or who has read my books or this blog, knows, when it comes to accuracy, I’m obsessive to the point of being anal. This time, however, I was in a hurry, and too tired to think, and, yes, I screwed up. I apologize.

Pink Slime and History, Redux

No, I don't plan to blog obsessively about Pink Slime (PS to you and me) --- but I had another thought after I posted yesterday's rant about PS and history. 

My brain kept coming back this comment by Marion Nestle:

If [allowing the use of deboned meat] is acceptable to people, it essentially means it’s OK to eat the kind of stuff we put into pet food." “Culturally we don’t eat byproducts of human food production. It’s not in our culture. Other cultures do. We don’t.”

Where do I start? How about with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of human history. Think about the stereotype of the "French housewife," making practical use of every bit of food that comes her way.

Think of peasants from prehistory to, well, now --- also making practical use of every bit of food that comes their way. With food always in short supply, and hungry people to feed, humans have, for ages, used up every bit of food.

You know? Like scraping every. last. bit. of meat from the bones of a carcass. Like dumping the bones and their remnants of meat into a pot of water and cooking it until the bones are softened and those last jots of protein have fallen from the bone.

Only someone who has never wanted for food would equate "pink slime" with dog food. Only in the extraordinarily affluent U.S. would people attack an industry for trying to make use of rather than waste food.

As I've noted here before, Marion Nestle is prone to playing fast/loose with facts. (*1)

 In this case, she goes too far. Way too far. To refer to meat as "dog food" simply because she doesn't like where that meat comes from is more than wrong-headed. In this case it borders on immoral.

There is another critcism of PS that's also worth mentioning (along with, yes!, a bit more history):

Some critics argue this: If the stuff is safe to eat, why do its manufacturers use ammonia-based (and other) processes to sterilize it?

Folks, you'd be amazed at how much of your meat gets sterilized these days before it hits the table. In this case, the procedure was added to the deboning process back in the 1990s, presumably after an outbreak of e. coli-related illnesses. (See yesterday's blog entry for that point.)

Here's the thing about e. coli: As I hope most of you know, we all carry this bacteria. It's in us all the time. Cattle also carry it in their digestive tracts.

Critics argue that e. coli has become more common in recent years because meat inspection has become lax.

Maybe. Maybe not. (I favor the "not" side.)

But here's another point that most people don't know (because only a nerdish history-head like me would know stuff like this):

e. coli first became problematic back in the early 1980s. At the time, that puzzled scientists --- but eventually they pinpointed the likely reason why e. coli had suddenly become a problem:

For more than a century, one of the main missions of the US Department of Agriculture has been to eradicate livestock diseases, whether "Texas fever," pleuro-pneumonia, bruccelosis (I probably spelled that wrong) or the dozens of respiratory diseases that afflict poultry. The USDA combatted livestock disease because those cause high mortality rates among livestock, reduce herd and flock sizes, and drive up the cost of food.

(As I said yesterday, it's impossible to overestimate the impact of Americans' demands for cheap food.)

By the middle of the twentieth century, the USDA had succeeded in eliminating and controlling most livestock diseases. The department's campaigns were so effective, in fact, that cattle grazers and feeders reduced the number of vaccinations they gave their livestock, or abandoned the shots altogether.

The unexpected consequence was that, for the first time in a century, the e. coli that cattle naturally carry had a chance to flourish unimpeded, and rather quickly became a problem for humans. (We have a much harder time with e. coli than do cattle.)

Meatpackers have always used various materials and substances to "preserve" meats --- meaning to prevent the growth of bacteria in those meats. The method used to sterilize PS is just one of those methods.

Any chance we can all just step back from the witch hunt hysteria and think about this matter? Fearmongering, whether by politicians or food activists, is bad policy because instilling fear becomes a convenient way to prevent otherwise rational people from thinking a problem through. 

So. How 'bout a little reason and a few facts with that Pink Slime?

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*1. Just so we're all clear: I've got nothing personal against Nestle. I don't know her. Have never met her. It's unlikely I ever will meet her. My point is that she commands attention and it's unfortunate that she chooses to abuse her power by playing so fast/loose with facts.

Want A Little History With That Pink Slime?

UPDATE: For those of you just tuning in, I wrote a second PS blog entry. You can read it here. Also, a kind reader, Travis Arp, corrected a mistake I made in this entry. You can read that in the first comment below. “Pink Slime” made the headlines of my local newspaper this morning (said paper being the Des Moines Register, that’s not surprising; the Register, even in its current scaled-down version, still covers news of interest to agriculture).

The point of the story, versions of which appeared in most major newspapers, is that pink slime’s days are apparently numbered. Food activists have succeeded in forcing grocery stores and restaurants to stop selling the stuff. As a result, beef prices will likely rise.

Whereever does this historian begin in making sense of the Pink Slime Propaganda campaign? (Maybe the better question is: Where should I end this rant?? There’s so much I can say . . . .)

First a word about PS: It’s beef, people. Plain ol’ beef. It’s created by using a deboning process that removes every last morsel of flesh from beef carcasses. During the cutting, slivers and bits of bone end up with the beef, but those are reduced to mush in the processing that follows.

Second, a bit of history. The Wikipedia entry for PS and most newspaper reports create the impression that PS dates to the 1980s. Wrong.

In the BEEF industry, its use dates back to the mid-1970s, although poultry and fish processors were already using the technique. Beef packers began using in the in mid-seventies because, at the time, all meat prices, but especially beef, were in the stratosphere. A host of factors pushed those prices up (you can read all about this in Chapter Five of my forthcoming --- 2013 --- book Meat: An American History), including a global food famine, inflation, rising fuel costs, unemployment, etc. 

Meatpackers were having a tough time turning out meat products at a price consumers would pay. Consumers were outraged; they organized boycotts; the White House imposed price controls. Etc. (Five years of research for this new book taught me one thing: American consumers demand cheap food, and especially cheap meat, and when they don’t get it, there’s hell to pay.)

So pushed by consumers on one side, and soaring costs on the other, meatpackers asked for, and got, permission from the USDA to use a “mechanical deboning” process that allowed them scrape meat off carcasses so that what had been waste could be eaten. (*1)

I gather from the Wiki entry and other reports that in the 1990s, a guy named Eldon Roth, who also founded Beef Products, Inc., the nasty, evil company that makes the stuff (yes, I’m being sarcastic) developed a method of sterilizing deboned beef. I’m assuming the timing was not a coincidence: In 1993, there was an outbreak of e. coli-related illnesses (and a few deaths) caused by eating fast food burgers. (*2)

Food activists object to PS on two grounds (no pun intended):

First, they argue that this is not real beef but is being passed off as such. They’re wrong. It’s beef. If you’ve eaten a hamburger in the U. S. at anytime since the mid-1970s, you’ve eaten PS.

Second, they object to the use of ammonia to sterilize the meat.

In the words of a couple of critics:

According to Marion Nestle:

“If this is acceptable to people, it essentially means it’s OK to eat the kind of stuff we put into pet food,” she said. “Culturally we don’t eat byproducts of human food production. It’s not in our culture. Other cultures do. We don’t.”

And Jamie Oliver:

“I hope the U.S. government is also listening because it’s partly responsible for lying to the public for allowing this cheap, low-quality meat filler to be used for so long without having to legally state its presence on packaging”. (*3)

I’m all for food safety, but in this case, the reaction is irrational. If PS were unsafe, we’d have learned that, oh, about 35 years ago. Really. There’s nothing unsafe about this. The reaction is also simply wrong. This is meat. It’s not “byproduct.” It’s BEEF.

The real problem, as near as I can tell, is that many food activists simply don’t understand how meat is manufactured; don’t understand  how demanding average consumers are (see above about boycotts, etc.), and how difficult it is for meatpackers to make a profit on beef in particular. 

The only reason companies like IBP or Tyson or Cargill earn a profit on beef is that they control the materials from farm to grocery store; they run highly efficient packing plants; they produce in huge volume; and they subsidize FRESH beef by also making “value added” products. (Think microwavable pizzas with beef, or cans of chili con carne.) It’s incredibly difficult to make a profit on FRESH meat in general and beef in particular.

You get my point: Pink Slime isn’t unsafe. You may not like its appearance, but unsafeness (is that a word) does not follow from unpleasant appearance. (LOTS of things in life are unpleasant to look at, but it doesn’t follow that they’re unsafe. Think, oh, I dunno: giving birth? Slaughtering an animal?)

What I find most interesting about the PS uproar is how much, alas, it resembles the prohibitionist movement of a century ago: Fear-mongering. Half truths. Appeals to emotion rather than fact and reason. 

Don’t get me wrong: I agree with the food activists on many points. Many. What I object to is the, how shall I put it? --- tone of hysteria attached to their work. The self-righteous “we don’t like it and therefore it’s bad and screw the truth and facts” tone of their approach. 

Again, I side with the pro-food group more than I don’t. But in this case, they’re engaged in a witch hunt, creating unnecessary fear and alarm, doing an industry a great disservice, and, yes, if the deboning process is banned, beef prices will like go up. It’ll be the equivalent of culling a hell of a lot of cattle from the nation’s herd. 

They sound so much like prohibitionists that it scares the hell out of me. Where, I wonder, will their fear-mongering and disregard for fact and reason lead?

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*1. At the time, Ralph Nader and Michael Jacobsen of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (if you’ve read my beer book, you KNOW what a fan I am of MJ and the CSPI...) objected to the process, filing complaints with the USDA and FDA. (I’m being sarcastic about MJ and the CSPI. I do NOT like scolds, food or otherwise.)

*2. The e. coli episode was caused by meat that had not been cooked at a temperature high enough to kill bacteria. The outbreak began when people ate hamburgers from Jack In the Box, a fast food chain in the northwest, and then expanded when primary carriers made contact with others. Sadly, many of the infected were kids, and when they went to daycare, they infected other kids. If I remember right, one child died.

*3. Both quotes from "Pink Slime Maker Suspends Some Plant Operations."

Historical Tidbits: Meat. Tyson Closes the Original IBP Packing Plant

Before I hie myself back to final revisions: Today the Des Moines Register reported that Tyson Foods plans to close its slaughtering facility in Denison, Iowa. I note this for two reasons:

First, by coincidence I'm in the midst of revising the chapter in which I recount the founding of IBP and the construction of the Denison packing plant, which began operating on March 21, 1961. It was IBP's first facility, and was, at the time, a marvel of modernity. It wasn't the only such modern marvel among packing plants, but it helped push IBP to the top of the beef-packing heap just a few years later.

But second, the article is interesting (to me) for the reason that Tyson gave for the closure: The decline in local supplies of cattle.

If only Iowa cattle feeders had listened to IBP's honchos back in 1965! Four years into it, IBP executives realized they'd made a rare miscalculation: Iowa cattle feeders couldn't provide the company with enough livestock to keep the plant running at capacity.

The company drew on cattle from a four-state area, which added to its costs, so IBP's executives urged Iowans to feed more efficiently, pointing out, correctly, that they were being clobbered by cattle feeders in Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and other western states. Feeders in those states had the advantage of better climate, cheaper feed grains (primarily sorghum, which was far cheaper than corn), and a more efficient feeding system. 

That led IBP to announce plans to build a state-of-the-art, confined cattle feedlot, less because it wanted to get into feeding than because it hoped doing so would inspire/encourage Iowans to modernize their feeding practices. The response? Iowans lobbied a Congressional representative to introduce legislation that would ban packers from feeding livestock.

Several years later, IBP finally opened the feedlot, but in conjunction with Iowa State University, which operated it as a research facility. And the then-president of IPB wrote to an Iowa Senator warning, again, that if Iowans didn't move with the times, they would lose their cattle feeding industry to western feeders.

They didn't, and now they have. The whole story is more complex than that, but, hey, I gotta go finish revising that very tale, And you can read more about it when the book comes out.

When The High Road Isn't; Or, Yet Another Reason Why Zealots Makes Me Queasy

I'm moderate in my politics --- or centrist or whatever the term is for people who tend to take a balanced view of politics, government, the "process," and so forth. 

It's my view that in a democracy, compromise greases the wheels, which means that most of the time, every "side" gets a little bit of what it wants. (And, heh, it takes forever to get anything done. But hey! You stuff to happen fast? Go live in a dicatorship.)

Which is why I'm skeptical of zealots on both ends of the political spectrum. I'm dead certain people like Glenn Beck twist the facts at every opportunity and are consistently careless with words, not just in choice but in use. 

That carelessness, I assume, is intentional. "Spin" a situation ever so slightly with just the right word and just a little twist of the facts, and voila! You've revved up your followers and convinced them yet again that the "other side" is evil.

But the "right" doesn't have a lockhold on fact-twisting and intentional carelessness. The "left" can be just as manipulative. 

Consider this example. Below is tweet posted a week or so ago by a woman I'll call Madam Food Warrior. She's a Very Big Shot in the "real-and-pure" food movement. A Very Big Shot. She's holds a prestigious position. She's written several books on "food politics." When she speaks, people interested in the food movement listen. 

She's responding to news of a USDA decision to allow unregulated use of genetically modified alfalfa. (That specific context is irrelevant to my point.)

Uh oh. FSN says White House forced USDA to OK GM alfalfa so it would look business friendly. http://tinyurl.com/4h66dao 

Wow. Sounds bad, eh? The White House forced Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack to issue a decision and apparently did so to appease Big Business (which is enemy number one to people in the "real-and-pure" food movement.)  

So I clicked on the link to learn more about this pressure-from-the-top. The link led to an article at Food Safety News that contained more details about the decision about "deregulating" GE alfalfa. 

The report also contained a sentence to which Madam Food Warrior was obviously responding. Here it is:

Sources familiar with the negotiations at USDA, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Food Safety News they believe the White House asked Vilsack to drop proposed regulations so the administration would appear more friendly to big business.

My reaction?: Uh, what? 

I re-read the original tweet. As you can see, it asserts that the WH "forced" USDA to make a decision. 

Now look again at the quotation from the news report itself. According to that sentence, anonymous sources "familiar" with the negotions said that they BELIEVE the White House "asked" Vilsack to issue a particular ruling.

Did I just fall into a parallel universe?

A report from "anonymous sources" "familiar" with the situation who said they "believed" X happened is a loooooooog way from offering evidence that would have enabled Madam Food Crusader to ASSERT that the White House FORCED the USDA to act in a particular way. 

Sources "familiar" could mean janitors cleaning the hallway who overheard part of a conversation. It could mean lower level flunkies who heard something from someone who heard something from someone who heard something from someone who was there. 

The fact that these sources "believe" X happened doesn't mean they KNOW X happened. I can "believe" that Glenn Beck means well, but it doesn't follow that I know for a fact that he means well.

So what's point? 

This: Madam Food Crusader has almost 48,000 followers on Twitter. It's safe to assume that at least half are spammers, marketers, and the like who aren't interested in what she has to say.  (I took a quick look at her followers list. It's full of the usual scammers, spammers, marketers, etc. She obviously doesn't cull her list. I do cull spammers from my list and that amounts to half the people who follow me.) 

So let's say she's got 24,000 legitimate followers. Suppose all of them read that tweet. And suppose, oh, a quarter of them -- six thousand -- retweeted the tweet.

See where I'm going? Her careless (and presumably intentional) use of words created a false impression of a government decision, and thanks to the power of Twitter, that false impression then twisted and spun its way around the web.

If she were any old person, it might not matter. But she's not just any old person. She's a major figure in this movement. When she speaks, people listen. So when she speaks, she oughta be more careful about how she uses language to convey information. And so should the rest of us.

Moreover, the "food" movement portrays itself as traveling the moral high road. A large part of its thrust is that its adherents care about the planet, about poor people, about human health, and so forth, and care more than the nasty farmers and corporations who are only into food for the money. Their embrace of the moral high ground is a crucial part of their message.

But when I read stuff like this, I wonder if they've fallen off the road and into a gutter.

I know, I know: zealots are zealots because they care less about "facts" than they do about their cause. I get that. I know that. 

But in the age of the world wide web, information travels faster than ever, reaches more people faster, and, in the face of an onslaught of information, many people latch on to the easy, already-packaged conclusion. Because, ya know, it's easier to do that than it is to check out the situation for yourself.

But because it is so easy; because zealots on both sides are so ready and willing to manipulate their followers, well, I think I'll just stick with the center. Because I'm not sure that anyone at the spectrum poles can be trusted.