The Village Idiot

Food Fight!

By Jim Mullen

A few months ago, there was a brouhaha over whether pizza sauce is a veg­etable. It cer­tainly is to me. But for years, I thought bacon was a veg­etable. I always won­dered why no one made salad bits to sprin­kle on my bacon, which is a million-dollar idea if I ever heard one.

The lat­est food fight is over whether “pink slime” should be used in ham­burg­ers. My gut instinct is that no, it shouldn’t be used in ham­burg­ers. It should be left in bologna and hot dogs where it belongs.

Still, I was sur­prised at how many nation­ally known pur­vey­ors of fine burg­ers said they would stop using pink slime now that their secret ingre­di­ent was no longer secret. Until they said they’d stop using it, almost no one knew they were using it.

It turns out that beef “trim­mings” used to be sold mainly as pet food because they con­tained too much E. coli and other bac­te­ria that were harm­ful to humans. But then the beef indus­try started spray­ing these left­overs with an ammo­nia gas, killing the pathogens, and renamed them “lean finely tex­tured beef,” which sounds so much more appe­tiz­ing than “pink slime.”

It reminds me of a story I heard long ago from an old-timer in the adver­tis­ing busi­ness. It seems a can­nery had bought a batch of salmon with very white flesh. It tasted like salmon, but it didn’t look like salmon. Some genius in the mar­ket­ing depart­ment came up with a great idea. The can­nery printed “Won’t turn pink in the can” on the label, which, of course, was true.

I often won­der how many peo­ple who have savored the fish known as orange roughy in fine restau­rants real­ize that for most of its his­tory, that fish was known as a slime­head? There were plenty of slime­heads to go around until the name change. Now they are being hauled out of the ocean faster than they can repro­duce. The orange roughy pop­u­la­tion would prob­a­bly appre­ci­ate it if we started call­ing the fish slime­heads again.

It seems every week we have another debate about food. One year it’s trans fat, the next it’s sugar. Trans fat will kill you, sugar will kill you, cho­les­terol will kill you, salt will kill you, fat will kill you, carbs will kill you, not eat­ing at all will kill you, overeat­ing will kill you.

I just bought a half-gallon of ice cream, and on the lid it says it’s packed with cal­cium and vit­a­mins A and D. I don’t think you have to have a Ph.D. in nutri­tion to real­ize that even with the vit­a­mins and min­er­als, ice cream is not health food. But it does prove some­thing that food writer Michael Pol­lan said about food mar­ket­ing: “The more health claims there are on the label, the unhealth­ier the food.” Adding a mul­ti­vi­t­a­min to a frosted dough­nut does not mag­i­cally make it a bal­anced meal.

Some clever sci­en­tist is sure to tell you that ammo­nia in its var­i­ous forms occurs nat­u­rally in some plants, is used in food pro­cess­ing and is per­fectly safe, and he would be right. But he also would be com­par­ing apples and oranges to unsellable scraps of fat, sinew, efflu­via and meat bits, pul­ver­ized into a pink paste and sprayed with ammo­nium hydroxide.

Is that how the food sci­en­tist makes his ham­burger at home? Is this what he feeds to his chil­dren? Does he invite the neigh­bors over to watch this being made before grilling a few burg­ers for them on Sat­ur­day night?

There are many things that some peo­ple eat that oth­ers find supremely unap­pe­tiz­ing — Lim­burger cheese, frog legs, fried crick­ets, raw oys­ters, hag­gis — but they don’t try to sneak these things onto your plate. Lim­burger is proud of being a stinky cheese; hag­gis is pre­sented with all the flour­ish of Cher­ries Jubilee. They are all upfront about what they are.

If pink slime pur­vey­ors want to proudly put it on the store shelf, more power to them. Oth­er­wise, we might think they have some­thing to hide.

(Jim Mullen’s newest book, “How to Lose Money in Your Spare Time — At Home,” is avail­able at amazon.com. You can reach him at jimmullenbooks.com.)

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Apr 18 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.