Illinois Schools Buying 'Pink Slime' Beef Once Again
By Anthony Todd in Food on Sep 11, 2013 3:00PM
Fast food restaurants won't buy it. Grocery stores won't sell it. But "pink slime," the ammonia-treated beef product that caused a huge stir last year in the media, is back in some schools, including those in Illinois.
After the revelation last year that the government was buying most of the chemically-treated meat scraps to serve in school lunches, the USDA allowed schools to drop the product. Most did, and this time last year only three states, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota were still serving the stuff. But financial pressure has brought it back.
Politico obtained USDA purchasing data that indicates that four more states have jumped back on the ammonia-beef bandwagon, ordering more than 2 million pounds. Illinois is one of those states, along with Pennsylvania, Virginia and Texas. "Lean finely textured beef brings down the cost of ground beef by about 3 percent, which can add up quickly in a program that feeds more than 31 million school children each day."
The USDA and the beef industry lobby insist that the product is safe (though some butchers aren't so happy with it), and up to 15 percent of it can be mixed into ground beef without labeling. Need a reminder of exactly what this stuff is?
Considered by the beef industry to be an impressive innovation, lean finely textured beef is made from the remnant scraps of cattle carcasses that were once deemed too fatty to go into human food. The scraps are heated and centrifuged to reclaim bits of muscle and then the product is treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli before being mixed into ground beef.
Perhaps one solution is to serve kids less meat in school lunches? Or to increase the subsidies paid to school lunches—schools that serve better meals to comply with the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act receive only six cents per meal in extra cash. In any case, schoolchildren in Illinois will once again be eating lean finely textured beef at lunchtime.