Following is something everyone should read about. Our family has made a commitment to never eat at fast food joints again. We are buying only organic meats and milk, free of antibiotics and hormones. And we refuse to contribute our dollars to the killing of Americans through horrible diets anymore.
Do the research yourself. You will be horrified at what you have been thinking was safe all these years. I have learned that what the food companies have foremost on their agendas isn't the health and well being of the people who consume what they make. It is their wallets. I suppose I always knew it, and just didn't want to believe it. I will eat their food no more!
Would You Soak Your Beef in Ammonia?
March 27, 2010Salem, Massachusetts
By Inger Pols
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Stranger than Science Fiction
The Money Trail
The Food-Safety Disconnect
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When will we realize that while budgets are tight, some savings are simply too costly to justify.
Take this story from the New York Times published in December of 2009.
Once upon a time, there was a beef processing company called Beef
Products Inc. looking to make more money (not unusual). It wanted to find a way to take the fatty meat trimmings (which could only be sold for pet food or cooking oil) and create a product they could use to enter the hamburger business
But the trimmings were susceptible to contamination by E. coli and salmonella, so the company had to find a way to treat the meat scraps so that they would be safe from contamination.
So Beef Products developed a process to treat the meat with ammonia. Yes, ammonia.
Untreated meat has a natural ammonia level that rates about 6 on the pH scale, similar to milk or rain water. But this company found that if they treated the beef with an ammonia process that resulted in changing the pH level to about 10 (an alkalinity that surpasses the range of most foods), they could kill the E.coli and salmonella.
Pink Slime
So the company took their study to the U.S.D.A., which was concerned about E. coli and salmonella. One former U.S.D.A. microbiologist admitted that he and several scientists were concerned that no independent validation of safety had been provided. Another, Gerald Zirnstein said the processed beef looked like “pink slime” and went on to say “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”
But in the end, the U.S.D.A. not only approved the ammonia-processed meat, they were so pleased with the performance of the ammonia process that they exempted the company from routine testing of the hamburger meat!
A top lawyer and lobbyist for the meat industry argued on Beef Products’ behalf that another company had just received approval to not disclose a chemical used in treating poultry, so therefore this company shouldn’t have to disclose the use of ammonia. He won.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the ammonia process.
The Money Trail
So the Beef Products sold its ammonia treated meat to McDonalds, Burger King and all the other fast food chains, as well as to many grocery stores.
And the Agriculture Marketing Service, the U.S.D.A. division that is responsible for buying food for school lunches, overcame initial objections and decided to use the ammonia-processed meat too because it saved three cents a pound off the cost of making ground beef. Last year, the company sold about 5.5 million pounds of the ammonia-processed meat to schools alone.
Beef Products, which does not disclose its earnings, generated an estimated $440 million dollars a year in additional revenue from the trimmings previously unfit for human consumption.
And we, as consumers, would probably never have known about this at all, had it not been for a problem.
The ammonia process left the meat smelling pungently of ammonia, even as the company produced a taste test saying that some school children preferred the taste of burgers with more of the ammonia processed meat.
In Georgia, officials returned 7,000 pounds of the meat to the company after smelling a “very strong odor of ammonia” in the meat being used to make meatloaf for state prisons. (They did not know about the ammonia process, because it was not on the label, so they assumed the meat had been tainted.) They noted in their complaint, according to the New York Times, that the “level of ammonia in the beef was similar to levels found in the contamination incidents involving chicken and milk that had sickened schoolchildren.”
Beef Products told the U.S.D.A. that the ammonia-treated meat was safe and when it was diluted with other ground beef. The U.S.D.A. accepted this conclusion, so the company was off the hook.
But others complained about the smell, too.
Vulnerable to Contamination
So the company had to do something and it released new research showing that E. coli and salmonella were undetectable at pH levels of 8.5. That enabled it to reduce the level of ammonia and lessen the smell. So Beef Products altered the process to lower the pH level, though the company would not reveal to exactly what level. (Samples that the New York Times collected showed a pH as low as 7.75, below their revised test minimum.)
But in doing so, this left the fatty meat scraps more vulnerable to contamination.
And that is where the company surfaced on the public radar.
School lunch program testing revealed E. coli and salmonella dozens of times in Beef Products’ meat. Back-to-back incidents in August of last year determined that two 27,000-pound batches of the meat were contaminated, but thankfully they were caught before the meat was consumed by school children.
Last July, salmonella concerns resulted in a temporary ban of Beef Products’ meat by school officials in Kansas. It was the third time in three years the company’s meat had been banned. But the processing facility remained open and continued to supply other customers (including fast food restaurants and grocery stores) with meat even though they couldn’t sell to schools during that time.
When the New York Times broke the story and presented the U.S.D.A. with the information, its top officials said that they did not know what their peers in the lunch program had known for years.
The agriculture department responded and revoked Beef Products’ freedom from routine testing. It also reversed its policy about pathogens: Because this beef was supposedly pathogen free, it was not included in recalls, even when pathogens were found in tainted hamburgers!
Food Safety Disconnect: What is Wrong?
While in a way I feel we should cheer that there was a response as a result of the NY Times investigation, it’s clear that there is a disconnect between the various divisions of government, and that this lack of communication and knowledge exchange is hindering public safety.
But more than that, I am concerned that we as a public have become too comfortable with scandal and no longer react.
I am not sure what aspect of this story bothers me most:
The fact that ammonia is being injected into meat;
The fact that the process of injecting ammonia into substandard previously inedible meat makes it then acceptable;
The fact that despite no outside substantiation that this process is safe, it was approved;
The fact that because it is seemingly safe, it is exempt from any further testing;
The fact that this meat is being consumed by school children as part of hot lunch programs in order to save pennies;
The fact that government agencies—and branches of the same agency—don’t talk to each other;
(When that happens in corporations, we consider them dysfunctional and they usually don’t stick around long.)
The fact that the company continued to sell the meat to other customers even after contamination was confirmed by one customer;
That there is no real recourse to be taken against this company and it continues on as before selling its ammonia-laden meat, although now it is no longer exempt from testing;
Or that when all of this comes to light, we read it and move on.
I feel outraged that we are allowing substandard food products to replace real food in our diets. Is this what we want to eat?
Are we OK letting accountants make food decisions, so that saving three cents becomes more important than health and wellness?
It strikes me that it is not dissimilar to the situation in the automobile industry in America. I remember being in a meeting 20 years ago in which there was a discussion on saving a half a cent on a screw that would last through warranty (hopefully) versus spending an extra half a cent for a more expensive screw that would last 10+ years.
It took awhile, but car manufacturers finally realized that they needed to take a more holistic view: That there were other costs associated with choosing the less expensive screw. Things changed when the decisions were no longer made solely by the bean counters.
When will we take a more holistic view of our food choices and realize that while budgets are tight, some savings are simply too costly to justify?
To your health!
Inger Pols
Editor of New England Health Advisory
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