Got pink slime?
I have not been following the controversy over so-called “pink slime” — finely textured beef made of trimmings from the butchering process. However, yesterday’s visit to a pink slime production plant by prominent state officials from the largest meat and cattle producing states — including Iowa’s own Governor Terry Branstad — piqued my interest in the topic.
As a vegetarian, I do not necessarily care what cheap garbage meatavors are stuffing their faces with. (I do, actually, since I am sure many of them are in my health insurance pool. Yikes.) Plus, if I were to ever eat meat again I would make sure it was local, grass fed, and sold by a farmer who would gladly invite me to his farm to see the operation with my own eyes; I would support “glass abattoirs,” people who had nothing to hide, and no one else. I would also not eat it at every meal. However, most Americans have no dietary morals and will gorge themselves on whatever is cheapest until it is exposed by the media and given a bad nickname.
Though apparently safe and more nutritious since, according to the DMR article about the gubernatorial visit, “it is leaner than other ground beef,” pink slime has earned a bad reputation in the last couple weeks. I am not sure how it all started, but supermarkets, school districts, and individual consumers across the country have stopped buying products containing pink slime. This has obviously had a disastrous effect on producers. According to the DMR:
Consumer defections have already cost more than 650 jobs, at least temporarily, at Beef Products Inc., which suspended operations of plants in Waterloo, idling 220 workers, and in Kansas and Texas.
The article goes on to quote Branstad:
Branstad said he wants to end the “smear campaign and stop the use of inaccurate, inappropriate and charged words designed to scare people.”
“I believe the national media have permeated this discussion with a poisonous tone that’s detrimental to the beef industry and the jobs that support it,” he said.
“I do not believe workers in plants in Iowa, Kansas and Texas should wonder why they do not have a job because of misleading headlines.”
I am sure a number of the workers Branstad referred to are likely illegal immigrants, but that is beside the point. (The meat industry cares nothing about its workers, period, so I am unsure why Branstad all of a sudden has a heart for them.) The reason for Branstad and the other governors’ defense is, I am sure, economic. The meat industry is a prominent presence in their states, and, regardless of its safety or nutritional value, pink slime creates jobs and major profits for those at the top — generous campaign donors — so it is obviously a good thing. Eat it or else!
Eerily, this whole thing makes me think of Soylent Green.
