Lean beef or pink slime? It’s all in a name.
OUR VIEW
Over the past two decades, you’ve probably eaten plenty of hamburgers with “lean finely textured beef” in them. Who cared? It sounds like a premium offering from a gourmet health food store. But “pink slime”? Not so much.
Faster than you can say yuck, the name change prompted several huge grocery chains to stop buying ground beef that contains the stuff. Parents are clamoring to get the filler out of school lunches, and many districts have complied. The product’s maker has temporarily closed three of its plants, which employ more than 650 workers.
To set the record straight, “pink slime” is not unsafe, even in the eyes of some staunch food safety advocates. And it is lean beef, though beef with an unappetizing history. It starts life as slaughterhouse trimmings, which once were relegated to pet food and cooking oil. Before last month, few outside the meat industry and government knew that one of America’s favorite foods was laced with something once destined for dog chow.
That lack of disclosure — plus the power of an evocative name — make the story of “pink slime” instructive.
In the early 1990s, Eldon Roth, a savvy Midwest entrepreneur, came up with a way to turn meat trimmings into profit. He heated them, spun them in a centrifuge to separate the tiny particles of meat from fat, then treated the product with a puff of ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria. It became known in the industry as “lean, finely textured beef,” or LFTB, and Roth made a fortune selling frozen bricks of it to add to ground beef. It makes the beef cheaper and leaner.
Not long after, a USDA scientist, inspecting for product safety, coined the name “pink slime” in an internal e-mail. For years, the epithet remained buried, until The New York Times mentioned it in a 2009 story critical of its maker, Beef Products Inc. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver railed against it, and recent stories by ABC News and The Huffington Post, accelerated by social media, made it disgustingly famous. Repulsed consumers reacted.
“What's in a name?” Shakespeare asked. These days, just about everything.
In the marketing world, a snappy, evocative name, or branding, as it’s known, has always had the ability to turn a simple product into a gold mine. Think about how some ice and flavoring in a cup became the ubiquitous Slurpee. Negative branding, often used in politics, can do the opposite. Labeling inheritance taxes as “death taxes” turned public opinion against them, even though the taxes affect only a tiny sliver of the richest estates. Was Iraq really “Bush’s war” or the nation’s? And should health reform be known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare or, more darkly, a government takeover of the health care system?
The law’s critics must wish they’d been first to dream up the “pink slime” label. Food guardians who beat them to it are reveling in the outrage of hamburger eaters everywhere.
It’s something of a hollow victory given that pink slime is probably safer than the rest of raw ground beef. But its use points to a broader problem in the nation’s food supply.
Thanks to industry lobbyists, Americans are often kept in the dark about what’s in their food and how it’s made. The USDA says labeling for LFTB isn’t necessary because it is beef. Telling consumers about the puff of ammonium hydroxide isn’t necessary, either, because that’s a “process,” not an ingredient. All this sounds like bureaucratic mumbo jumbo.
Whether you call it LFTB or pink slime, people should know what’s in their hamburger and how it’s processed.
By the way, what’s in hot dogs?