WASHINGTON — When McDonald’s and other fast-food chains announced last month that ”pink slime” was no longer being used in their burgers, some thought that the product — beef trimmings treated partly with ammonium hydroxide, had disappeared from the nation’s food supply.
But a new report in The Daily tablet newspaper suggests that the slime will appear in school lunches this spring — 7 million pounds of it.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, schools and school districts plan to buy the treated meat from Beef Products Inc., or BPI, for the national school-lunch program. The USDA said in a statement that all of its ground-beef purchases “meet the highest standard for food safety.” The department also said it strengthened ground-beef safety standards in recent years.
Last April, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver reported that 70 percent of the nation’s ground beef is made with BPI’s product.
BPI recently said that figure still holds. In a statement, the company called ammonium hydroxide a “natural compound ... widely used in the processing of numerous foods.”
Gerald Zirnstein, a former microbiologist at the Food Safety and Inspection Service, came up with the term “pink slime” when he toured a BPI production facility in 2002.
Zirnstein did not “consider the stuff to be ground beef,” according to The Daily.
CHANGE.ORG has a petition on its site asking the USDA to stop buying the slime.
Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service say ammonium hydroxide is “generally recognized as safe.”
