Opinion

If we can't get rid of pink slime, let's at least label it

Since the dawn of time, kids have joked about the mystery meat served in school cafeterias. But only recently have we realized how disgusting the stuff actually is - and what grossness lurks, unlabeled, in many grocery-store packs of ground beef.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced plans to buy 7 million pounds of "Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings" - a filler that a federal microbiologist nicknamed "pink slime."

Pink slime is made from slaughterhouse scraps: fatty cuttings and bits of connective tissue, mostly from the outside parts of the cow, the bits most likely to be contaminated by excrement. First the scraps are warmed and spun to remove the fat. Then the goo that remains is sprayed with ammonia to kill nasties such as E. coli and salmonella.

It's a delicate balance: If there's too much ammonia, you can smell it later in the ground beef; if there's too little, the nasties live. Beef Products Inc., the company that makes pink slime, tests its product for the six most common strains of E. coli. Unfortunately, that testing won't catch strains that are less common but just as deadly.

We're proud of Houstonian Bettina Siegel, who this month led the lightning-fast campaign to get pink slime out of school lunches. Siegel writes two blogs about school lunches: The Lunch Tray, which is national; and The Spork Report, specifically about the Houston Independent School District. (You can find the Spork Report on chron.com, and read her Outlook piece today on page B9.) Outraged by news that the Department of Agriculture planned to buy pink slime for next year's school lunches, Siegel started an online petition to remove the stuff from our nation's cafeterias.

In a little more than a week, more than 230,000 people signed the petition, and the brouhaha made national news. Thursday, the FDA announced a partial retreat from its plans: Schools, it said, would be able to opt out of pink slime. We hope that Houston-area schools do so.

And we think that consumers should have the right to say no as well. Right now, because the FDA puts pink slime in the same category as regular beef, the filler isn't listed on package labels. As far as the FDA is concerned, ground beef plus pink slime is still 100 percent ground beef.

How often does pink slime show up in our grocery stores? According to the Washington Post, Beef Products Inc. recently estimated that its product is in around 70 percent of American ground beef.

We repeat: 70 percent.

That number turns our stomachs. The FDA needs to reconsider those labeling rules right away. A package labeled 100 percent ground beef ought to contain nothing but ground beef - not ground beef mixed with ammonia-spritzed gelatinous glop.