Other
Pink Slime and the Modern Jungle
(2012)
Abstract
As widely reported (and covered by The Society Pages’ Sociological Images), it took less than two months after an ABC News report about the use of “pink slime” in grocery store beef for manufacturer Beef Products Incorporated to close three of its plants. The industry came under intense scrutiny about this “lean finely texture beef” (LFTB) being used as an additive in 70% of ground beef in the U.S. Critics have pointed out that the product is in our school lunches, while defenders, including a bipartisan group of politicians and high ranking members of the USDA, have claimed the ammonia-treated bricks of beef product are actually safer and contain less fat than “normal” ground beef. They’ve suggested Americans are being misled by a smear campaign and a widely circulated image of what is actually “mechanically separated chicken,” Pepto-Bismol pink and oozing from industrial machinery.
In this roundtable we ask experts on the production and consumption of food to weigh in onthe public outcry and the larger lessons we might learn about the American meat industry, so many decades after Upton Sinclair.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2012
Citation Information
K. Green, K. Valentine Cadieux, J. Guthman and M. Nestle. "Pink Slime and the Modern Jungle" (2012) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kvalentine-cadieux/25/