A pink slip for 'pink slime'

Goodbye, pink slime.

Hy-Vee is the most recent grocer to announce it will discontinue selling lean, finely textured beef - that amonia-treated concoction that few of us had even heard of until recently, let alone thought we might be eating.

Even though a number of consumers have concerns about widespread use about the meat byproduct, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says there is nothing unsafe about the additive.

Even so, the response to recent news reports about the additive - which is made through a process that would have given Upton Sinclair the dry heaves - show that the majority of consumers find it pretty disgusting.

First, fatty trimmings once deemed suitable only for pet food or cooking oil are heated up and centrifuged to separate the meat from fat. The lean bits are compressed, then treated with ammonium hydroxide gas to kill possible bacterial contaminates such as E. coli. The resulting pink goo is mixed back into ground meat.

Because it's not technically an additive, manufacturers are not required to let consumers know if a product contains finely textured beef.

And that's the real gross-out factor here: that we carnivores likely have been eating the stuff for years without knowing it, all the while blithely assuming that the hamburger we ordered at a restaurant, or the hamburger we bought at the grocers, was simply that - ground-up beef.

Hy-Vee announced on Thursday that in response to customer concerns, its 200-plus stores would no longer purchase ground beef products containing the mixture. They join other grocers with local outlets - like Safeway and SUPERVALUE - that already have announced they'll cut the product from their supply chain.

And the USDA - which, according to one news report, had plans to buy 7 million pounds of the product for school lunches - earlier announced they'll let districts decide whether or not to serve the product to students.

Of course, even lean finely textured beef has its supporters, God bless them, who find nothing wrong with the process. Some have even implied that pink slime opponents are nothing but weak-stomached fussbudgets.

If you want to eat pink slime, I won't stop you.

But it's a problem when a don't-ask, don't-tell system of food production allows manufacturers to sneak a product in under the radar and onto our plates.

After all, if we are what we eat, don't we have a right to know what, exactly, that is?

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net