Home of the hamburger, home of ammonia-treated beef waste

'Food' product made from ammonia-treated beef that includes "fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil..."

Oh yuck...

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

[...]

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment.

[...]

In response, the agriculture department said it was revoking Beef Products’ exemption from routine testing and conducting a review of the company’s operations and research. The department said it was also reversing its policy for handling Beef Products during pathogen outbreaks. Since it was seen as pathogen-free, the processed beef was excluded from recalls, even when it was an ingredient in hamburgers found to be contaminated.

[...]

Mr. Roth and others in the industry had discovered that liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge resulted in a lean product that was desirable to hamburger-makers...

This is an extract from a 4 page article from the New York Times. I think any American who is not a vegetarian must be a) extraordinarily conscientious about where they source their food, b) extremely deluded or c) downright insane. I suspect most fall into the latter two categories. There is just so much stuff over there that is sold as food that really has no right to be called such. God forbid that ever happens to our food supply over here to the same extent in Australia. We already have disgraceful conditions allowed for farming of pigs and poultry. Moves are underfoot in New Zealand towards introducing US-style feedlot dairies. Let's hope for progressive, not regressive, policies on food and agriculture in Australia in 2010. Lord knows it's probably too late for the US, poor bastards.