Let's start with the basics.
"Pink slime", officially known as lean beef trimmings, is a kind of mechanically separated meat.
Once the actual steaks have been removed from the cow carcass, the remaining bits of scrap meat, fat and gristle are thrown in a big centrifuge.
The machine forcefully separates the muscle from the fat, resulting in 95% pure, fat free meat.
It is then sanitized with ammonium hydroxide and reshaped into ground beef.
Is it going to kill you? No.
It hasn't yet, and I seriously doubt it ever will.
Can it make you sick? Maybe a little bit, years from now.
The government says it's perfectly safe, but the government also thought asbestos and DDT would be good for the public health.
All the same, the worst symptoms you'll feel are probably the stomach pains when somebody shows you the pictures.
Is it icky to think about? Yeah, but so is eating fungus, and no one's raising a stink about mushroom pizzas.
Final question: Did the meat factory decide to do this because they're the kind of mustache twirling corporate villains who would risk selling people a gross product just for funsies? Of course not.
They don't want a scandal, they're just suffering from something I like to call Old Lady logic.
I'll explain in a moment.
The primary complaint most people have with the process is that it uses ammonium hydroxide to clean the meat.
The chemical is harmless enough to have passed through FDA approval, but the process must be pretty unsanitary if the industry has to use ammonium to make it 50% less contaminated by E.
Coli.
Running all that raw feedlot meat through the same centrifuge means that everything will otherwise become infected with some of the diseases that run rampant on conventional farms.
But they have to risk mixing it all together, because they need an efficient way to get rid of all that extra fat, full of cholesterol Omega 6 fatty acids that harden your arteries and other nasty things that Americans are learning to avoid like the plague.
They (the meat industry) has all that extra fat in the mix because they keep the animals in tiny boxes where they can't exercise, and feed them nothing but extremely fattening grains, rich with Omega 6.
And they do that because...
it's easier? I know an old lady who swallowed a dog.
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat, She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider...
You know, before conventional farming swallowed the fly and put cows on feedlots, we had pasture-raised, grass-fed beef.
Because they're given the freedom to move and eat a healthy, natural diet, they are naturally much leaner, and a vastly greater percentage of their fats were the kind of the benign, heart healthy kind.
And the meat didn't need ammonium to have 50% less E.
Coli.
Cows given the space to relax and not stand in their own waste for years have upwards of 99.
6% percent less E.
Coli.
Think about that the next time a corporate sponsor says pink slime is a necessary evil.