I’m getting tired of the knee-jerk reactions to all the pink slime controversy from the environmental establishment. Like this one, which spured this article.
I totally agree that pink slime is gross, but so is digging through your trash for recyclables, toilet-to-tap water recycling. But both are very green.
Likewise, industrial processes like CAFOs and pink slime are not all bad- the good and the bad have to be carefully weighed… we should not dismiss one side just because it is gross.
Grass-fed cows produce more methane per pound of beef than CAFO cattle (because the latter gain weight faster.)
And “pink slime” is a way to use parts of the cow which would otherwise be thrown away. If we use 15% pink slime as a filler in our hamburger, we reduce the environmental impact of that hamburger by approximately 15% (as something which would otherwise be waste, pink slime has no negative environmental impact, except for that caused by processing it, and has some positive impact because it’s not rotting and producing methane in a landfill somewhere.
Pink slime is an environmental innovation. It only started being gross when we started talking about it. So do the planet a favor, and stop worrying about what’s in your burger.
Unless you’re ready to give up the burger altogether.
Dan Gordon said
I agree that there is a sort of immediate ‘knee jerk reaction’ to this pink slime controversy. I feel that whenever there is a big controversy like this in the food industry it is automatically magnified. It is interesting how you compare this to foraging through trash. Great article though. thanks