Hamburger and Pink Slime

I know where these tomatoes and peppers came from!

When I was a little girl, I used to walk over to Tony Sidowski's meat market and get hamburg. He used to take this huge slab of beef out of the cold closet, whack off a portion of it and I watched as he carefully passed the meat through three times. The meat was red with little white speckles. That was hamburger. That was DOSE hamburger- hamburger the way that God created it!

Somewhere along the way, hamburger turned an homogeneous pink. For a while I thought the difference was grass-fed beet because grass-fed beef is definitely red, while most beef today is definitely pink. Now I find out that the reason hamburger is pink is because they add pink slime!

That sounds bad-but now we're getting some Republican governors who claim that it's just beef. We see this factory tour where beef goes into a conveyor belt and these pink slimy pellets come out the other end. That might make some think that makes it meat-but first you need to understand what happens in the black box!

Wikipedia states that meat that has already been processed to remove all the edible meat, and heated to remove all the usable tallow, is the sent to a factory where it is ground up, steamed, separated to remove more fat, then sprayed with ammonia which is then converted to ammonium hydroxide (household ammonia) by the water left in the meat.

So, it seems that this is meat that has been processed and reprocessed to remove anything of any conceivable value, then processed some more to add fillers to meat that can technically still be called meat.

Our ancestors couldn't eat it. We weren't created to eat the connective tissue, grizzle, and cartilage that is in pink slime, but now thanks to modern technology, we too can play the role of bacteria in consuming these waste products.

I think that it is time to either find a market where I can choose the meat, see it ground and watch it wrapped- or get a grinder and grind it myself. Just another hazard of getting too far away from our food!