Then there are the preservatives that are allowed in processed meats. LFTB, as everyone is by now aware, is dosed with ammonium hydroxide to raise the slime's pH high enough to kill bacteria. These ammonium levels are not close to being toxic, but they still smell and taste foul, tempting processors to go light on the treatment to make the product more palatable.

While LFTB is an ingredient for extending ground beef, the other forms of processed meat I've been comparing it to are finished products, stable at refrigerator temperatures, because they've been preserved by agents stronger than ammonium hydroxide. Some legal preservatives have been linked to cancer, and the World Cancer Research Fund has recommended that people avoid processed meats altogether.

While preservatives in processed meats are considered ingredients and thus require labeling, BPI has successfully argued that its ammonium hydroxide is a processing agent, not an ingredient, meaning it needn't be listed on the product label.

For something that isn't an ingredient, ammonium hydroxide has certainly made its presence felt. As the Times reported, blocks of LFTB had a heavy stench even when frozen, causing BPI to cut the treatment down to precariously low levels. To its credit, BPI has since improved its safety protocols and now leads the industry in testing for not just one, but all of the so-called Big Six strains of E. coli. Assuming BPI can control the bacteria in its product, what's left to hate?

Gerald Zirnstein, a microbiologist, coined the term "pink slime" in a 2002 email. But his chief complaint about the stuff, according to the Times story, isn't that it is dangerous, pink, or slimy, but that it is misidentified. "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef," he told the Times, "and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."

This is hardly damning criticism -- it's like complaining that 2 percent milk is being labeled as whole milk. And LFTB is, in fact, pure beef, except for the ammonium hydroxide process.

Implicit in Zirnstein's comment is the assumption that the non-muscle beef tissue in LFTB is less nutritious than the muscle tissue in burger meat. But the tissues from which LFTB is made, including collagen, do in fact have nutritional value, as BPI rightly claims in its new website pinkslimeisamyth.com. Indeed, people pay a lot of money for collagen supplements in pill form.

So, is pink slime any worse than pink cylinders, yellow nuggets, brown breakfast sausage patties, or any number of mystery meat products? Probably not. And for what it's worth, it isn't even slimy.

But even if pink slime is no more dangerous than many other products meat products on the market, it's nonetheless a timely opportunity to discuss the problems and realities of our industrial meat system. Given the recent bevy of state "ag gag" bills -- already signed in Iowa and Utah, and proposed in Illinois -- it appears that battle lines are being drawn over the control of information concerning meat processing. These bills would make it illegal to secretly record what goes on in meat processing plants. The forces of anti-slime could provide a boost of energy in opposing these measures.