When I think of ammonium hydroxide, I think of something I should find in a chemistry lab or my bathroom cleaner, not my next hamburger.
“Pink slime” is fatty leftover meat trimmings from cuts of beef that are spun and heated to remove the fat, then exposed to ammonium hydroxide to remove bacteria and make it “safe for consumption.”
Federal regulators claim this seemingly unsafe concoction meets food safety regulations, but the majority of consumers beg to differ.
I definitely don’t want to eat meat that contains something found in a common household cleaner. Something about that just doesn’t seem right.
Gerald Zirnstein, a microbiologist and former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee, first referred to the finely textured beef as pink slime in an email to his coworkers. A Freedom of Information request released Zirnstein’s email to the New York Times in 2009 for an investigative article on food safety.
Zirnstein has now become an “involuntary whistleblower” for the cause.
Food safety blogs and other organizations were outraged upon learning that the ammonia-treated meat was considered safe for consumption.
Consumers have written to their local grocery stores asking them to remove pink slime from the shelves, and an active Change.org petition calls for the removal of pink slime in school cafeterias. The petition has over 250,000 signatures
As a result, many grocery store conglomerates and fast food restaurants are no longer buying or selling the chemically treated beef. Grocery stores such as Albertsons and Safeway have boycotted the sale of this “non-toxic” meat.
Pink slime entered the market around 2002, and it is concerning that most of us have probably consumed it at some point in the past 10 years.
It seems that not everyone is concerned with eating the ammonia-containing meat, though, and is instead worried that the price of ground beef will skyrocket.
This however, does not concern me. I would rather have to pay a dollar or two more for real ground beef instead of eating leftover meat that’s been treated with chemicals I used to clean. What’s more important: your money or your well-being?
Now that the public has become more informed about pink slime, I definitely feel safer about the ground beef that I will consume in the future. I can only hope that in the next few months, I won’t have to question where my meat is coming from.
Reach the columnist at agales@asu.edu
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