Yesterday the Wall Street Journal mentioned that BPI was temporarily shutting down three plants that make “lean, finely textured beef”, aka pink slime. Now this is startling: according to that article, the annual pink slime production was, most recently … 850 million pounds per year! The article further states that this is equivalent to 1.5 million head of cattle! (Ron Plain’s, University of Missouri January 2012 estimate is that the 2011 calf crop was 35.3 million. So, recently, pink slime has made up over 4 % of our total beef supply??? Which would make it a much larger percentage of our ground beef supply …)
The WSJ article goes on to say that “lean, finely textured beef” has been in our ground meat for … 20 years!