A few days ago, I asked Marion Nestle for a small favor and she graciously complied so I feel a little conflicted at disagreeing with some of her editorial comments about Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB). She writes a column for the San Francisco Chronicle and on Friday created an excellent overview, done in a question and answer format, of the mostly erroneous beliefs surrounding LFTB.
First, I have to agree with her excellent definition of the product. In her column she wrote, “Pink slime is the pejorative term for ‘lean finely textured beef,’ a product designed to recover useful bits from carcass trimmings. These are warmed, centrifuged to remove the fat, treated with ammonium hydroxide gas to kill pathogens and compressed into blocks that are frozen for later use.”
But I’m blowing a whistle and throwing a flag on a potentially misleading statement she made a few paragraphs later. Because it’s just a technical infraction, I’ll only penalize her with a loss of down. She wrote, “For one thing, it solves an enormous problem for meat producers. Only about half the weight of the 34 million cattle slaughtered each year is considered fit for human consumption. The rest has to be burned, buried in landfills or sold cheaply for fertilizer or pet food.”
Let me clarify that statement for the casual reader who might mistakenly infer that half the meat from a cow is unfit for human consumption. “Half the weight” includes bones, the hide, the digestive tract and other bits and pieces. Those are the products that are used for medical purposes or become leather, gelatin, fertilizer and a thousand other things important to many other industries. There is a use for every part of the carcass; if the process is done right, nothing should be left to burn or sent to a landfill.
Next, Nestle wrote, “Here's the dilemma. LFTB solves a serious food safety problem. The meat trimmings that go into cheap hamburger are said to often be heavily contaminated with bacteria, some of them dangerous. The ammonia processing makes LFTB safe. “
“Often be heavily contaminated?” Whoever says that definitely got it wrong. The statistics I’ve seen say the bacteria on beef trim that might cause food borne illness is about the same as most other cuts of meat, vegetables, fruits and other foods consumed by humans. Producers of all foods are acutely aware of food borne illnesses. If they weren’t already aware, lawyers like Bill Marler have underscored the importance of the situation for them.
“LFTB is not really slimy and it is reasonably safe and nutritious. But it violates cultural norms,” Nestle said. Another technical foul and loss of down. Agreed that it isn’t slimy but calling it “reasonably safe and nutritious?” That’s damning it with faint praise. Statistics show that it is among the safest foods available and, at 95 percent lean, it’s a beef product that’s also among the most nutritious foods. I’ll give her a free kick on the cultural norms statement, though. Jamie Oliver, Jim Avila and a host of amateur bloggers and lazy journalists who know almost nothing about LFTB have “chicken-littled” it into that corner.
I’m giving Nestle a 15 yard penalty AND loss of down for repeating comments made by the unschooled school food advocate Bettina Siegel who, in a perfect display of stampede journalism, collected 230,000 email signatures on a letter to the USDA demanding LFTB be banned from the school lunch program. Siegel wrote, "It is simply wrong to feed our children connective tissues and beef scraps that were, in the past, destined for use in pet food and rendering, and were not considered fit for human consumption."
Siegel must have a huge following of non-critical thinkers to find nearly a quarter million willing to sign on to her less than scientific demand so I’m holding her to a higher standard of reporting. It would have taken her just a few seconds to Google LFTB or a few minutes to contact someone at BPI to learn the facts about the process and what is really used to produce the product. There is no connective tissue and the scraps were the bits and pieces left on the carcass after the larger muscle masses were trimmed away. If BPI president Eldon Roth is guilty of anything, it was looking at that waste of perfectly good meat and devising an economical way to make it useful. He was going “green” two decades before it was cool.
“Do we want LFTB in our food? Or do we and our children deserve better?” wrote Nestle. She makes the unwarranted assumption that LFTB is inferior and asks two rhetorical questions that don’t belong together. We and our children deserve the best and top quality. Safe and affordable beef belongs in that category. LFTB is a top-quality and safe product. It also helps make ground beef more affordable without sacrificing any of the nutritional benefits.
Her column signed off with this statement: “An even better idea: Let's produce safe meat in the first place.” I’m penalizing her half the distance to the goal for that infraction even if she was sneaking up on the 50 yard line. Meat is safe. It is safer now than it ever was and, as we put more hurdles into the process to kill pathogens, it will be even safer in the future.
I am reminded of two uncomfortable truths for many people. The first truth: if humans think something is food, so do thousands of organisms, including pathogens. That’s a battle that will never end so expecting any food to be perfectly safe is unreasonable. The second truth: meat as a whipping boy, responsible for the majority of the occurrences of food borne illnesses and the main cause of the obesity epidemic in America, is a faulty concept eagerly pushed by a lot of non-meat eaters. Half of all food borne illnesses are caused by foods that don’t occupy the center of the plate – fruits, and vegetables, for instance. The most recent proof of the pudding on that claim? Remember the cantaloupe problem last summer? Or the spinach scandal before that?
PS: Full–disclosure: I was outraged when ABC News reporter Jim Avila asked Nancy Donley, founder of STOP Foodbourne Illness, at the BPI press conference if her organization had removed from its website the amount of contributions it has received from BPI. (Donley founded STOP after her 6-year-old son died in 1993 from E. Coli O157. Donley has been a vocal supporter of BPI's use of ammonia hydroxide gas to kill pathogens.)
After thinking about it, I understand my reaction. I know her and respect her moral center and the great work done by her organization. For Avila to question the reason behind her commitment and tear open a still raw wound almost 20 years after the fact amounted to fighting words for me.
His professionalism demanded that he ask the question, though, which took some courage in the hostile environment he found himself. It might have made for good journalism but it was in incredibly poor taste. He is an investigative journalist which brings a broader set of ethics to his work. More than just reporting on daily events and the immediate who-what-where-when-and-why behind those events, he owns the story and all the fallout – good and bad – that it brings.
Having that ownership means investigative journalists must dig deeper than daily news reporters do and write a fair, balanced and thoroughly researched story. Questioning Nancy Donley as he did told me he hadn’t done his homework on her or STOP.
If you aren’t familiar with Marion Nestle, she is a well known foodie and author of the new book "Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics," as well as "Food Politics" and "What to Eat." She is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University, blogs at www.foodpolitics.com and writes for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Read Marion Nestle’s column here.
Chuck Jolley is a free lance writer, based in Kansas City, who covers a wide range of ag industry topics for Vance Publishing.
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