I”m touched, though confounded, that Ms. Baumann has received so much amusement from my column on what the world has dubbed “pink slime.”
I can only assume she finds the loss of jobs and paychecks for several hundred families during the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression to be rib-tickling and the needless slaughtering of an additional one million head of cattle (to make up for the loss) to be side-splittingly-roll-on-the-floor hilarious.
?Reduce” used to be the first principle of environmentalism–reduce-reuse-recycle. Reducing the number of animals slaughtered for food should have been seen as a good thing.
Yet the cry was to stop BPI”s process, which salvaged 13 to 15 pounds of meat per animal.
This will now be made up in more animals being raised with higher costs for grain because of higher demand, more land being used for raising cattle, and higher meat and grain prices that will hit the poor the hardest.
I agree with Travis Arp, a Ph.D. student at Colorado State University, studying Meat Science. Mr. Arp wrote, “The blindness that society has exhibited throughout this entire circus speaks volumes to the unfortunate place in which media and science stand in the consumer food discussion.
While LFTB plants are closing, we have yet to see a bread, chocolate, ketchup, or pudding processing plant shut its doors ? and no one is approaching the bakery counter asking if their hot dog buns have ammonium used in them.”
I think hysteria has trumped reason and rationality. Ammonium is used in many foods to kill bacteria. Attacking the meat industry for its use seems senseless. An emotional knee-jerk reaction–in part caused by the intentional use of a word with no positive connotation (slime) ? has resulted in many people losing their jobs, and much more waste to be generated by the meat industry.
While many criticize the right wing for its use of specific words using to evoke emotions (death panels, anyone?), few level a similar criticism against the environmental wing for ad hominem and name-calling.
Funny, huh?
Norm Benson
Lower lake
