McDonald's, Burger King, and Taco Bell all agreed last week to promise to stop using ammonia-treated meat after some prodding a public shaming by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. The so-called "pink slime," which is caused by the use of the ingredient Ammonium Hydroxide, is no longer good enough for our fast food restaurants—but it IS still good enough for our schools.
According to The Daily, the U.S. Department of Agriculture officials confirmed that they will buy seven million pounds of the ammonia-cleansed meat for the national school lunch program in the coming months. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration as well as the Food Safety and Inspection Service considers ammonium hydroxide as ‘generally recognized as safe,’ ” USDA spokesman Aaron Lavallee told them in an email.
The pink slime is made from treating otherwise inedible scrap meat with the chemical Ammonium Hydroxide, which is he same stuff you use to clean your kitchen counters. The use of treated scrap meat "to me as a chef and a food lover is shocking," Oliver said on his TV show Food Revolution. "... Basically we're taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest form for dogs and making it 'fit' for humans." You can see his original segment on the topic below:
As far as we're concerned, this isn't going far enough. Why should all these poor, lazy public school children get precious pink slime-infested meat, let alone the real stuff? Why waste all these abundantly useful chemicals on them when there's a much cheaper, much more renewable form of meat that we could be feeding our kids: poop burgers.
