What Exactly is "All Beef" Hamburger?

Beef-eaters, listen up. This is not a question about vegan or vegetarian vs omnivore. Red-meat eating habits have nothing to do with it. People need to be concerned with the food supply in the US, and this is a prime example of how corrupt the food moguls are. Check out the entire article at the online version of the New York Times. A print version of the article was on page A1 in the December 31, 2009 edition. The entire story unfolds like fiction, but it's not.

To me, the food moguls are corrupt, because in my book, a "food product" is not necessarily food. If I want ground chuck, I want a cut of chuck trimmed and ground. Same goes for ground round or ground sirloin. Don't add extra fat, and don't add water. (That water that cooks out of your hamburger is added. I've weighed as much as 30 percent water in the pan, and they're charging meat prices for it.) I have questioned hamburger ever since the 1970s beef shortage when they started adding soy protein to ground beef. Soy was a cheap alternative back then, before high priced veggie-elite food was in vogue. You could even buy the soy protein at the meat counter to mix into meat yourself.

This hamburger story begins eight years ago, when the US was slammed with the E.coli outbreaks in the meat supply. An inventor and entrepreneur in South Souix City, SD, Eldon N. Roth, was interested in finding a way to use the garbage from beef processing. This includes carcass scrapings (the membranes and stuff between skin and meat, and from the inside of the carcass), fat trimmings, and until this point, all kinds of clean-up junk that was used as pet food ingredients. Most of these trimmings are highly susceptible to pathogens, and they have not been used for human consumption because they are breeding grounds for salmonella and E.coli. Plus they are fat scraps with no food value.

One food safety consultant even praises Mr. Roth for devising his method of turning the trimmings that have "no functional value" into a food product. Yippee. Read on and see if you agree.

The trimmings are processed by grinding up all of this fatty trash and cooking it, and then separating "protein matter" in a centrifuge. The product is a foamy pink mashlike substance. Mr. Roth devised a way to kill the pathogens in the foamy mash by running it through a tube where it is injected with NH3, or ammonia gas. It is then flash-frozen into large blocks or chips and used by meat processors throughout the country as a hamburger additive.

Mr. Roth's company is Beef Products, Inc. (BPI). Other processors also use this method to glean a beef "product". Over the years, BPI has had to alter the process due to the large number of complaints about the ammonia odor and taste in the meat, raising issues about the pathogen counts and the safety of the product. Another quirky point is that the ammonia gas was not listed on any label, because the USDA agreed that it was a "processing agent" and not an ingredient. It is, however, in the product, hence the odor.

The product is used in the USDA school lunch program meat throughout the US. It saved 3 cents per pound in 2002 in a 10 percent content ratio. In 2004, school lunch officials raised the allowable amount of BPI product in school lunch hamburger to 15 percent to save even more money. The BPI product is an ingredient in most of the hamburger you buy in supermarkets throughout the country. Fast food restaurants use the product in their hamburger (without divulging the ratio used), and it is in hamburger served in most other restaurants. In fact, the only way I know of that you can be sure that your ground beef does not contain this "pink slime" (as it was called by Gerald Zirnstein, a food safety microbiologist) is to have meat ground in front of you at the meat counter. Or grind it yourself.

If you are concerned about what your children are eating, and about what you buy to feed your family, read the entire article at this NY Times link.

Safety of Beef Processing Method is Questioned, by Michael Moss, contributor, Griff Palmer, NYTimes Online December 30, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=2