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Yeah.. you are gonna hate me. I am about to ruin your hamburger habit. Ground beef? Let’s chat.
Did you know that the FDA actually notes a difference between hamburger and ground beef? Hamburger can have up to 30% added beef fat (from any source…trimmings, etc) while ground beef cannot have added fat; only what is in the particular cut that is being ground.
Home ground beef... I know what's in that!
Your favorite fast food place, those convenient frozen patties and the fresh hamburger in the cheap plastic rolls in the store. Gastronomic Roulette, right there.
The ground beef can come from several different cows, several different slaughterhouses, and possibly several different countries – and then be mixed in one huge batch, separated into packages and put on the shelves or sent to food manufacturers to be made into burgers. Since it comes from so many places how can it be traced? It can’t.
But that’s not the worst of it. The New York Times says that up to 80% of the burger sold in America contains an additive whimsically referred to as pink slime. It sounds like a Frank Zappa song from the 70′s doesn’t it? Pink slime has been being added to burger to cut the cost (an estimated 3 cents a pound) with the FDA’s blessing since about 2003.
Once the usable cuts are taken from the carcass the rest is stripped off by a machine that used centrifugal force to get every last molecule from the bones. Most of the material left is in the stomach cavity, by the way. Small pieces of muscle, connective tissue, pieces of organs that weren’t quite all the way removed…These trimmings were once used as pet food and cheap cooking fat (you know, the kind that ISN’T used any more?) But that’s not all. Tom Philpott of Grist has this to say:
To make a long story short: Beef Products buys the cheapest, least desirable beef on offer–fatty sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor, which are notoriously rife with pathogens like E. coli 0157 and antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
Next this conglomeration of beef by products are put through a process that uses ammonia to kill any e Coli or other nasties. The USDA was so impressed with the ammonia treatment that it exempted meat treated with this process from having to be tested. The problem was that consumers detected a ” strong ammonia odor” in some of the meat and so the ammonia was reduced, although still used.
The company is called Beef Products International and a quote directly from their website says:
BPI’s products are found in the majority of all ground beef produced in the United States. Current production of over 7 million pounds per week, makes BPI the world’s largest manufacturer of boneless lean beef in the world. Eating a hamburger from a Quick Service Restaurant or buying ground beef from your local retailer, the chances are you’ll be eating product produced by BPI.
Like the high fructose corn syrup people, BPI says that ammonia is present in all living things and is therefore a “natural” ingredient. My response to that is that manure is present in all living things, too, but I don’t want that added to my Whataburger.
So, giving up hamburgers must be the answer right?
Wrong. Pink slime is also in the following products:
- Low-fat hotdogs
- Taco meats
- Lunch meats
- Chili
- Beef stick snacks
- Sausages
- Pepperoni
- Frozen entrees
- Meatballs
- Canned foods with meat (Spagettios with meatballs, anyone?)
The ammonia is listed as a processing agent and the pink slime is beef so it can be labeled pure ground beef. Gives a whole new meaning to special sauce, doesn’t it?
As far as which fast food places use the hamburgers made with it? McDonalds and Burger King do, the National School Lunch program does… Again, from Grist magazine
The National School Lunch Program, which forces cafeteria administrators to feed students lunch for $2.68 per student per day, is a microcosm of our cheap food system. Two-thirds of that outlay goes to overhead and labor, leaving much less than a buck to spend on ingredients. No wonder the lunch program is such a massive buyer of pink slime–3.5 million pounds last year alone, the Times reports.’
Taco Bell, Taco Bueno…. who else? Cheap food is cheap for a reason.
Now, you know I am not going to leave you there. There IS a solution.
Grind Your Own
Grind your own or have it ground for you at the market. It would be best if everyone could buy a whole, grass fed beef from a local farmer and have a trusted butcher package it. Not everyone can. You can, however, buy chuck roast at the store and have the meat department grind it up for you OR get a grinder and grind it yourself at home. I wrote an article a few years ago comparing some of my favorite meat grinders.
Grinding meat yourself doesn’t take very long, usually less than five minutes for two or three pounds. It is often as inexpensive as pre-ground meat, but most of all you know that it is safe. e Coli doesn’t occur in roasts for a reason. They are not near the intestines or abdominal cavity. That’s why you are warned about cooking hamburgers to well done but roasts and steaks can be rare.
Buy Grass Fed Organic
Simply, organic producers can’t stoop to these levels. They don’t have enough money to pay off the government.
Tips for Convenient Meals with Home-Ground Beef
- Use grated parmesan to add to home-ground beef to make meatballs, bake a huge batch of them and then freeze for up to six months.
- Make your own hamburger patties and freeze them raw with parchment between each patty or cook them rare and then freeze them to be finished later.
- Mix up a huge batch of taco meat in the crockpot and freeze it in meal sized portions.
Be an informed, responsible consumer. Don’t say you can’t afford to eat healthy foods… you can’t afford not to. Currently my grocery bill is 1/3 of my income and I totally understand but cutting out empty snack foods, buying the best quality you can, and adding homemade breads back to the dinner table will go a long way to make your dollar stretch.
The alternative is disgusting.
images : marye audet (c) 2011
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I think you can also use a food processor to grind small batches of beef at home. I have not bought ground beef since Jamie Oliver exposed this, except at Whole Foods Market from their butcher case. They grind it themselves. I actually prefer to use ground bison if I can get it.
A food processor minces it too fine for burger I think.
Food processor is useful for steak tartare. Just a few pulses on 1 inch cubes, mind you, no blender action. Chow has a nice recipe for classic steak tartare
http://www.chow.com/recipes/10983-classic-steak-tartare
This dish requires vigilance when sourcing ingredients, since it’s uncooked. But it is one of my favorite things in the world to eat.
… besides Dr. Pepper marinated sweet breads?
I actually prefer my sweetbreads neat, thank you very much
Sorry… but… blech.
When I was a kid, my dad would grab a few bites of raw hamburger whenever my mother was using it for dinner. I used to do it too… As I got older, I didn’t do it very often because I kinda thought it was weird. The last time I did it was when I was about 19 and I wanted to gross out some friends… it worked. LOL! Probably wasn’t smart, although that was the 60′s/70′s
and it might have been a little safer than it would be today :/
Another great article I will be sharing. Thanks Marye!
Thanks for sharing this so others may be informed. I have always wondered though about ground turkey products.
Just to clarify: processors enhance the amount of ammonia already present in the ground beef to raise the pH(alkalinity) of the meat and make it impossible for E. coli to live in it. The ammonia (added as a puff of ammonium hydroxide gas) is odorless and tasteless and makes ground beef safer.
Oh God, here we go again. If it is odorless and tasteless how do you explain this comment from the NY Times…
”
So…. if it tastes and smells like ammonia it is safe? But if it doesn’t it may not be? Please…..
You can have my share, k?
Listen, porn stars enhance the amount of breast tissue all ready present on their chests but it does NOT make it real…Or healthy.
Oh… and I am honored that you would notice my little blog.
Thank you, thank you for the “what’s in it” posts. So many people are not aware of what they are buying and consuming!
Youa re very welcome, Renee… If there is anything in particular you want me to research let me know – I am open to suggestions.
At issue here are five concepts: sanity, freedom, stupidity and transparency and accountability.
First sanity. As a scientist, I understand that frequently the thing that determines what’s a poison is the dose. We encounter many things, inadvertently, that are toxic in high doses. THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT SANE TO KNOWINGLY INTRODUCE THOSE THINGS INTO OUR FOOD. A good rule of thumb, I propose, is that any substance with an MSDS that specifies an LD50 (lethal dose) should probably not go in food. Ammonium Hydroxide has an LD50 of 350mg/kg. A small hamburger-eating child might weigh 20 kg. That means their lethal dose is 7000 mg. About the same as 7 coffee beans. Is it unlikely they would OD hamburgers by that much with gas puffs? Yes. But why introduce it at all? The answer is cheap food. In order to make cheap food not bacteriologic-ally toxic, we need to kill the bugs with shit that, in larger doses, would kill us, too (think of it as chemotherapy for food – an attempt kill the parasite with a dangerous molecular substance, without killing the host). So why not slow the hell down, and eat less and more expensive meat (more expensive because it’s processed less rapidly and more carefully)? Then this treatment would be unnecessary. But that’s not our culture. I travel all over the world, and the typical American diet is disgusting. It can be different.
Freedom. Fine, you want to eat gassed meat because it’s cheap. That’s your prerogative. I happen to want to consume raw milk. Unfortunately, in most US states, that’s NOT my prerogative. Because other people get to decide what’s safe for me. Not only is this fundamentally unfair, it’s objectively stupid, because we have people deciding that foods which have safely nourished people for thousands of years are not safe, while other foods containing known toxins are somehow safe with less than 50 years of operating history, despite a large and growing body of statistical evidence that they are wrong.
Transparency. Transparency is bureaucracy’s Kryptonite. The only reason we heap on more bureaucracy is because we have less and less transparency in our food chain. And to think there are active proposals under consideration in various state legislatures to ban photographing factory (and presumably all) farms! (The thought being that public confidence in our food system would be impaired. Damn right it would.) No, what we need is MORE photography of our food system in action. And we need disclosure of ingredients, and as importantly, processing methods. In my business, coffee is decaffeinated by a few methods. One is exposure to Methylene Chloride gas. The other is soaking in water. MC coffee is objectively safe as measured and reported by government. I have no requirement to label decaffeination method. But I do, because it’s the right thing to do. Inevitably this has led to the sale of virtually NO MC decafs in our business. Because given the appropriate level of transparency, most sane people go with water process. there are a few who objectively understand the risks (which are probably about the same as eating ammonium hydroxide gassed beef, i.e., virtually zero), but they now have the information and freedom to make that choice. As they should.
Finally, accountability. First, people need to be accountable for their own decisions. In this day and age, it would be hard to claim you didn’t know smoking would hurt you. The information about food is out there, too. That’s not to say producers have no accountability for the effects of their products – they do. They must be accountable to be honest and transparent in labeling (which includes not making sins of omissions, like failing to state they gas your beef, even if there are no measurable residuals). And when they lie, they could come down like a ton of bricks. I see no problem with seizure of entire businesses who commit consumer fraud. The problem now is that there’s no consequences. Kill some people with tainted spinach? Turns out to be a giant “so what” to the producer. That has to change.
All the new food regulation I see seems to me to be unnecessary. In every case I’ve followed, there was already at least one law against what happened. And it turns out to have had no teeth.
No, we need to make consumers smarter, give them information, allow them freedom of choice which includes getting rid of government decision-makers acting on our behalf, and when the rogue element hurts somebody with illegal acts, crucify them.
Perfect. Thanks Jim
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Isn’t the beef industry along with other meat industries trying to push to make it illegal for people to capture their slaughter houses in action on film, if you have nothing to hide ….? get my point. The richer some people get the better off they feel about themselves so that they can sleep at night they use money as a sedative for themselves so that they don’t actually have to think about whats in their products, and the people that consume it. Another thing its hard to think highly of a meat company that would feed their own family these contaminants. I also take it upon myself to be educated about these things and to change the way my family eats. Its just smart.