The Fall and Rise of Pink Slime and Faster Meat Packing Lines

Many people have forgotten about the 2012 “pink slime” scandal in which beef scraped from animals’ skeletal muscle at processing plants was extruded through tubes (looking like spaghetti or intestines) and treated with ammonia to kill bacteria. Few knew that pink slime was in 70 percent of US ground meat, unlabeled. (A US Department of Agriculture microbiologist had claimed the product was not even ground beef at all but connective tissue.)

Eating Pink Slime

A series of exposes by ABC News in 2012 about pink slime, officially known as “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB), provoked such national revulsion that the product’s primary producer, Beef Products Inc. (BPI), lost contracts with 72 customers, closed three of its four plants and laid off 700 workers, almost overnight. Cattle futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hit a low.