When celebrity cook Jamie Oliver declared war on the “pink slime” in America’s burgers, he wasn’t just looking for a better recipe—he was claiming to save a generation. With his dramatic demonstrations of household ammonia and laundry baskets, Oliver’s viral videos painted a grim picture of a food industry “killing our children” with chemically treated meat scraps. But beneath the sensational headlines and the $1.2 billion lawsuits lies a simple truth. Is “pink slime” a genuine health hazard, or is it just the victim of a very successful marketing nightmare?
Jamie Oliver’s Attack on McDonald’s
Jamie Oliver has famously criticized McDonald’s, using the stomach-turning label “pink slime” and a pretense of science to argue that McDonald’s burgers were not fit for human consumption. His pink slime actually has a more mundane name, boneless lean beef trimmings or BLBT.
Summaries of Oliver’s statements are all over the internet, and there is a bit of truth in them, mixed with a liberal helping of untruth. He claimed, for example, that McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets are made from the less desirable parts of a chicken, including fat, skin, cartilage, and internal organs, after the prime cuts of breast meat are removed. In fact, McDonald’s has been using white chicken meat in their nuggets since 2003. This meat is probably mechanically separated from the bone. This means that a mechanical process is used to get at all the bits of meat that would otherwise be left on the bone. However, McDonald’s does not use poultry “remains” nor would this be legal. Jamie Oliver knows what mechanical separation is, since he made a video about it, yet he chooses to push fabricated claims about the use of inedible scraps in McNuggets and other products.
Jamie Oliver’s ‘Pink Slime’
Oliver’s description of pink slime is also wrong. As I pointed out above, the technical name for this product is “boneless lean beef trimming” or BLBT. It used to be called “finely textured lean beef trimming,” although according to the American Meat Institute, this is actually a different product, which uses citric acid instead of ammonia hydroxide gas. Both products are, however, made in similar ways.
What is BLBT, aka Pink Slime?
Suppose you have a roast, a rack of ribs, or any cut of beef, and you trim a lot of the fat overlying the meat (which would have been subcutaneous fat). Well, that fat has some meat in it as well, but you have to sacrifice it. It is next to impossible to trim away only the fat without taking some of the meat and there is no practical way to get the meat out of the fat.
BLBT is a way of separating the meat from the fat trimmings. The fat is rendered at low temperatures and then centrifuged to separate the meat bits. The recovered meat may still contain about 7 to 17% fat, although it is possible to produce it with less fat with a modified process. The beef is exposed to a small amount of ammonium hydroxide gas to raise the pH and kill bacteria, then it is squeezed out through small tubes. Nutritionally, there is nothing wrong with the meat recovered from fat by this process. I’m sure many of my readers will disagree with this, but the scientific facts are on my side, and scientific facts are not something Oliver possesses in abundance.
Does McDonald’s Use BLBT?
McDonald’s announced that it would stop using BLBT in 2012 at the same time that Burger King and Taco Bell did. They also claimed they had already stopped using it by August of 2011. Personally, I’m glad they don’t use BLBT anymore, simply because you expect a burger that you pay for to have “real” ground beef, not the bottom-of-the-barrel product. If I pay the lowest price, I can expect to get the cheapest product. However, that is more an issue of getting what you expect as a consumer, rather than an issue of health and safety. From a purely practical and scientific standpoint, meat is meat.
Meat Is Meat
Jamie Oliver compared the “meat scraps” used to produce BLBT to inedible dog food. These claims are ridiculous. First, dog food is not inedible. Not even for humans! Furthermore, meat from trimmings is completely edible, and there is no nutritional difference between these trimmings and other meat. The product itself is not going to produce the tastiest hamburger, of course, or at least not the juiciest or most texturally pleasing one.
BLBT is not used as a stand-alone product but mixed with ground beef. No more than 15% of the product can be used, and the labels must state its use. This only applies to packaged food, however, If the ground beef that a restaurant uses contains BLBT, you will have no way of knowing unless the restaurant decides to provide ingredient information.
Despite Oliver’s exaggerations, there is no process can turn an inedible animal product into an edible one! Let me repeat that in bold to bring it home: There is no process that can turn an inedible animal product into an edible one!
If a butcher wasted a bunch of meat instead of trying their best to use as much of the cow as possible, people would say they were wasteful. But if the industry tries to do the same thing in a more efficient manner, people are grossed out. People all over the world eat parts of the cow that Oliver would call “only fit for dogs.”
The same type of foodie alarmism that criticizes the use of mechanical separation to get at every bit of the meat would sing the praises of dry-aged beef, which is a hugely wasteful process that discards a lot of expensive beef to satisfy the tastes of well-to-do restaurant customers.
Oliver’s Mischaracterisation of Ammonia Used in BLBT
I’d like to point out that in his video, Jamie Oliver admitted that he didn’t have a clue as to how the meat was produced and said, “this is how I imagine the process to be.”
He was also willing to create the unwarranted association in people’s minds that the ammonia was the same as you use in your house to clean things. He pretended as if household ammonia is just poured into the chicken (or beef). Instead of being a sensationalist, he could do some actual research. When you digest protein, your body produces a little bit of ammonia hydroxide. This is the same gas that is used to produce BLBT. In the body, this gas turns into urea, which is excreted. There is actually no evidence whatsoever that the tiny amounts of the substance imparted to the meat are of any health concern at all.
I am not defending the product or urging you to accept a burger made with BLBT rather than a good-quality ground beef. I am simply debunking some of Oliver’s BS claims that are not based on any true knowledge or research on his part. By his standards, as Rob Lyons pointed out in an article in the Huffington Post, he should be completely against sausage, a product that has been around for centuries as a way of using more of the animal and preserving the meat. 1Lyons, Rob. “The Truth About Jamie Oliver’s ‘Pink Slime’” The Huffington Post UK. N.p., 30 Jan. 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.
However, it was not Jamie Oliver who coined the term pink slime. Instead, it was coined in 2002 by a USDA FSIS microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, in an internal e-mail. He warned that the ammonia should be mentioned on the labels of packaged ground beef if the beef trimmings are added to them, saying, “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.”
His concerns, it turns out, were related to his perception that the product contained connective tissue, making it, in his opinion, not nutritionally equivalent to ground beef. There is no evidence that BLBT contains connective tissue, and it certainly is not made from connective tissue, per se.
One writer has claimed to have compared ground beef burgers with burgers made from BLBT and found them to taste and smell the same, but stated that the beef-trimming burgers were less juicy and mealy with bits of cartilage-like matter. This may be because there is more connective tissue in the product, or simply a reaction to the texture, or due to the expectations and pre-planted belief that the product would contain cartilage.
Regular ground beef, to some extent, will contain “gristle” or connective tissue, but this gristle may be more detectable in a more finely ground product. Be that as it may, I would not want to be sold a burger made only with beef trimmings, and certainly, if I were dining in a premium burger joint, I would be very unhappy with such an ingredient. However, my concern is not safety, but getting what I pay for!
Still, the term didn’t enter the public arena until 2009, probably due to its use in a New York Times article. Jamie Oliver started using the term pink slime in 2011, on an episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (he may have used it previously) aired on April 12.
In the show, Oliver criticizes the use of pink slime in school lunches, and the food supply in general, and is shown pouring liquified ammonia on beef trimmings. Perhaps the grossest bit of intellectual dishonesty, if not simply plain foolishness, that Oliver displayed was the claim that ordinary household ammonia was used to make the product.
The company, BPI (see below), and the American Meat Institute released a YouTube video with Dr. Gary Acuff of Texas A&M University, who rebutted some of Oliver’s claims. The American Meat Institute runs a website called “MeatMythCrushers,” which is the user you see associated with the video, below.
Video Rebuttal to Jamie Oliver’s Pink Slime Accusations by Gary Acuff of Texas A&M (Commissioned by BPI and the American Meat Institute.
BPI Defamation Lawsuit Against ABC Concerning Pink Slime
ABC is not the only one being sued. After BPI filed suit against ABC and others, Jamie Oliver himself was the subject of a suit when his allegations caused a worker in a plant that processed BLBT to lose his job.
This is because Oliver’s ridiculous and irresponsible statements have helped pave the way for many plants to shut down and many workers to lose their jobs. The suit happened in 2012 when Jamie Oliver, together with ABC, Dianne Sawyer, Jim Avila, and a food blogger named Bettina Siegel ,was sued by Bruce Smith, who was one of the over 700 people laid off by Beef Product Inc.
Smith claimed that the use of the term “pink slime,” which amounted to a slur against the product, caused him to lose his job. He was BPI’s senior counsel and director of Environmental, Health, and Safety. He filed the the civil suit in Dakota County District Court in Nebraska, and sought $70,000 in damages, stating “The company ‘and its employees were unfairly and unnecessarily maligned and accused of producing a food product that did not exist, a product that critics unfairly labeled “pink slime”,’ he said in a statement.” Ten other defendants were also included, but unnamed. Smith subsequently dismissed the lawsuit, for unknown reasons.
When ABC took up Oliver’s banner (I do not think they would have reported on this without Oliver having created a public sensation) and covered the “pink slime” issue, they singled out one particular producer, Beef Products Inc.. ABC’s coverage caused such a negative public perception of the product that three BPI plants were shut down, resulting in the layoff of 700 workers. BPI is suing ABC for $1.2 million in damages, saying that ABC’s coverage mislead consumers into thinking the product is unsafe.
ABC’s attorneys claimed that all of the ABC broadcasts concerning the product stated that the USDA had deemed the product to be safe (the USDA consulted with the FDA on the ammonia hydroxide process) and that it calling the product “pink slime” was not “incorrect.”
They also compared the product to all ground beef, which, they claim, is pink and has a slimy texture. BPI says that these statements concerning the USDA’s position were coupled with negative statements calling the product “filler” and “not meat.” BPI also claims that ABC implied that the USDA was not a credible source because the agency had gone against the recommendation of scientists in approving the beef product for use.
This is in regards to USDA FSIS microbiologists Carl Custer and Gerald Zirnstein’s argument against the approval of the product for human consumption, saying that it was “not meat” and was actually “salvage.” They wanted the USDA to seek independent verification of its safety, but the agency overruled them.
Despite ABC’s effort to prove there was no defamation and have Judge Cheryle Gering, in Elk Point, South Dakota, dismiss all 27 counts, she only dismissed five of them, and ordered the trial to go forward on the 22 remaining counts. It is still possible that the five dismissed counts, which deal with “disparagement for false implications,” could be considered, because they relate to count 26, which deals with “statutory product disparagement,” covered under South Dakota common law.
In June, ABC had also sought to have the case considered in the U.S. District court in Sioux Falls, but a federal judge ordered the case back to the state circuit court in Elk Point. Eric Conolly, the attorney for BPI, said that the company is pleased with the ruling and “We look forward to stating discovery and ultimately presenting our case to a jury.”
Besides ABC, others are also named in the suit, including anchor Diane Sawyer; and ABC correspondents Jim Avila and David Kerley. As well, the aforementioned Gerald Zirnstein, the former USDA scientist who originally named the product pink slime, is named, along with Carl Custer. Kit Foshee, a former BPI quality assurance manager, who was interviewed by ABC for their broadcast, is also named. (Additional sources: 2Judge Won’t Dismiss ‘pink Slime’ Defamation Suit.” Associated Press. N.p., 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.,3“Pink Slime.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Mar. 2014. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.,4Jensen, Werner K., Carrick Devine, and Michael Dikeman. Encyclopedia of Meat Sciences. Oxford: Academic, 2004.)
