http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pink-slime-for-school-lun_n_

• Login with Facebook to see what your friends are reading
• Enable Social Reading
• i

Pink Slime For School Lunch: Government Buying 7 Million Pounds Of Ammonia-Treated Meat For Meals

First Posted: 03/ 5/2012 5:19 pm Updated: 03/ 6/2012 9:03 am

    React   Amazing
Inspiring
Funny
Scary
Hot
Crazy
Important
Weird
  Follow     School Lunches ,   Video , E. Coli , Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act , US Department Of Agriculture , Healthy School Lunches , Healthy School Meals , Lean Beef Trimmings , Pink Slime , Pink Slime In Schools , Salmonella , School Meals , Soylent Pink , Usda , Education News    

SHARE THIS STORY

46,400 621 2,566 Get Education Alerts  Sign Up   Submit this story    

Pink slime -- that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade -- may have been rejected by fast food joints like McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King, but is being brought in by the tons for the nation's school lunch program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is purchasing 7 million pounds of the "slime" for school lunches, The Daily reports. Officially termed "Lean Beef Trimmings," the product is a ground-up combination of beef scraps, cow connective tissues and other beef trimmings that are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. coli. It's then blended into traditional meat products like ground beef and hamburger patties.

"We originally called it soylent pink," microbiologist Carl Custer, who worked at the Food Safety Inspection Service for 35 years, told The Daily. "We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."

Custer and microbiologist Gerald Zernstein concluded in a study that the trimmings are a "high risk product," but Zernstein tells The Daily that "scientists in D.C. were pressured to approve this stuff with minimal safety approval" under President George H.W. Bush's administration. The USDA asserts that its ground beef purchases "meet the highest standard for food safety."

Controversy surrounding "pink slime" stems from various safety concerns, particularly dangers associated with ammonium hydroxide, which can both be harmful to eat and has potential to turn into ammonium nitrate -- a common component in homemade bombs, according to MSNBC. It's also used in household cleaners and fertilizers.

In 2009, The New York Times reported that despite the added ammonia, tests of Lean Beef Trimmings of schools across the country revealed dozens of instances of E. coli and salmonella pathogens.

Between 2005 and 2009, E. coli was found three times and salmonella 48 times, according to theTimes, including two contaminated batches of 27,000 pounds of meat.

   OMG !  And the First Lady  supposedly cares abour kids  getting fat and unhealthy ?!!  

So in a nutshell, McDonald's and other fast food restaurants  couldn't sell pink slime  due to the public outcry so rather than throwing the product  away and losing money ...they secretly  made a deal to sell it to the Federal Governement to put in our kids' school lunches .  

 http://lolcatz.net/2014/we-iz-radeoaktifz/

Gross, just one more reason added as to why I pack my kids lunches....... what happened to the children eating healthy kick that the first lady is pushing??

Michele

 Well, my guess is that the first lady can't tell the Department of Agriculture what to do.   -Which is a shame as I'm guessing she probably wouldn't want to feed it to her dog far less the kids!

Where I live you have to bring your own lunch, and take your child to school yourself. We call it parenting. School busses and cafeteria lunches, pfft.

I'm hoping that is sarcasm. We take our kids to school too, but would never consider someone using the bus a bad parent.

The scary part is, the pink slime is not limited to school lunches. It was on the news this week that most grocery store ground beef contains the pink slime as a thickening agent. I'm so grossed out by this. I'm buying all my ground beef from a local food co-op that sells locally raised, grass-fed beef and is certified to be free of any additives, including pink slime. Yuk.