Pink Slime Is Safe For School Lunches, Says USDA

It’s pink, it’s slimy, and according to the USDA it’s perfect for school lunches. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is buying 7 million pounds of pink slime to use in school lunches, and despite thousands of angry parents and disgusted school children, the USDA says that the pink slime is perfectly safe to eat.

A spokesman for the meat industry said:

“Including LFTB (lean finely textured beef, AKA pink slime) in the National School Lunch Program‘s beef products accomplishes three important goals on behalf of 32 million kids. It 1) improves the nutritional profile, 2) increases the safety of the products and 3) meets the budget parameters that allow the school lunch program to feed kids nationwide every day.”

The USDA has also started a social media campaign, “Pink Slime is a Myth,” in order to defend the use of LFTB in the National School Lunch Program.

But a Twitter campaign probably won’t be enough to convince thousands of parents that the pink slime is good for their kids. Bettina Siegel, a food columnist and mother of two, started a petition to ban the pink slime from schools. As of today, Siegel has collected more than 200,000 signatures.

Siegel writes:

“Pink slime is the term used for a mixture of beef scraps and connective tissue (formerly used only for pet food and rendering) that is treated with ammonia hydroxide to remove pathogens like salmonella and E coli…. It is simply wrong to feed our children connective tissues and beef scraps that were, in the past, destined for use in pet food and rendering and were not considered fit for human consumption.”

The USDA approved of pink slime in 2007 and it was commonly used at fast food restaurants like Burger King, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s. But after the documentary “Food Inc.” and a report in the New York Times linked the beef to dozens of cases of E. coli and salmonella, most fast food restaurants have ditched the wanna-be-beef.

What do you think about the pink slime? If it’s not good enough for McDonald’s it probably isn’t good enough for the school lunch menu.