I am not a vegetarian... yet. But more and more I am moving towards a pescaterian diet. Hey I'm from Scandinavia and will never be able to give up seafood. But an article in today's Independent about the thick pink paste American food producers add to many popular products is enough to make any normal person's stomach turn.
In the land where pizza is classified as a 'vegetable' (someone needs to educate them) scientists have found a way to turn the scraps from the abattoir floor into a substance called 'pink slime'. They clearly didn't have a PR involved in the naming of the stuff. This pink slime is then added, unknown to consumers, to things like hamburgers, tacos and other beef-based junk foods. Why? To make the mince go further.
The process goes something like this: add the cow scraps into a heated centrifuge to separate the fat from the putty. Then treat the substance with a chemical used in household cleaners to kill off salmonella and e-coli (how kind) and mix with regular beef.
Now it is a while since I stopped eating McDonald and Burger King burgers (remember that photo of the McD burgers one year on... That was why I stopped). These companies have now stopped adding the slime to their burgers, but I am staying far away from them either way.
The pink slime has been legal to sell in the US since 2001, and today more than half of the ground beef sold in America contains the stuff. A sneaky legislation also doesn't make it necessary to mention it on the ingredients lists. Luckily this pink slime is banned in Europe.
Now I am all for finding solutions to make food go longer, such as growing meat in a laboratory, if it means a more sustainable food future for the world. But adding something clearly unhealthy to spend less on actual produce, in this case beef, is disgusting.
