This past week, the media woke up
to the shocking reality that our meat supply is in fact industrialized.
Long gone are the days of the friendly local butcher grinding meat for
kids’ hamburgers. Instead, most hamburger now comes from a corporate
behemoth you’ve probably never heard of called Beef Products Inc. (BPI),
or “the world’s leading producer of lean beef processed from fresh beef
trimmings.”
BPI now finds itself on the receiving end of consumer outrage over
the ammonia-treated ground beef filler that one former United Stated
Department of Agriculture (USDA) official famously dubbed “pink slime.”
The news surfaced last week that this scary stuff is currently being
served in school lunches, and a petition aimed
at getting current USDA officials to stop serving “pink slime” has
garnered more than 200,000 signatures in about a week. [Update: As of
March 15, the USDA has announced that schools will be able to “opt out” of pink slime. What they’ll be able to replace it with if they do is another question.]
