this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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I find it annoying they try to pose this as such an ugly product because of how it looks. It's ground up meat, why does it being "pink slime" make people cringe so bad?
Adding the ammonia and the chemical treatment of food is a different topic that is disgusting. But the appearance factor is nonsense to me. Some people need to make their own food, a lot of it is pretty gross until complete.
Ground up animal bits. Calling it ground up meat is a slight exaggeration. There is some very hard to get at meat in there though.
Mechanically separated meat is an effective way to turn every shred of animal into an edible product instead of sending it off to be processed again into some lower value product. If you're gonna spend all the time and resources to raise and kill an animal for food, why not make sure that the absolute maximum of it is turned into an edible product?
In general I agree. But the question is whether you can actually produce the product without the ammonia and chemicals.
Dog whistle. Using the term 'chemicals' as a negative serves only to gain support from the ignorant by obscuring the topic. All meat is treated with chemicals before you eat it, a solution of solvent, explosive sodium metal, and deadly chlorine being the most common.
I don't think salt is added to most meat before being sold to the customer. I think you are being disengenuous.
I worked at a meat processing plant, salt water is added to every piece of meat that went through there in order to bulk up the weight and increase margins. Sometimes it is just a soak in other cases (like peameal bacon) they inject it with 200 steel needles and a hydraulic pump.
Okay but I think you can read between the lines that salt wasn't the chemical that anyone was talking about here.
I can but can you look at a list of "chemicals" and identify which ones are food safe ingredients and which are hazardous? Not many people can, and using the label "chemicals" makes the problem worse.
For example polyethylene glycol is a food additive in Dr Pepper but ethylene glycol the poisonous part of anti-freeze. If you do not specify what chemicals you are concerned about and why then you are just using a catchall term to paint a particular product or process as bad.
You make an excellent point! Companies should not be allowed to use complex chemical names on food labels and instead should be forced to use words that consumers can recognize and use to make better informed decisions about the products they're consuming.
you true