Discussion Case: "Pink Sliming" the Processed Beef Industry
"Pink slime" certainly does not sound appetizing. This term was first coined by a microbi- ologist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspec- tion Service. It refers to lean finely textured beef (LFTB), a food product created by a process that recovers useful bits of meat from carcass trimmings. These bits are warmed, centrifuged to remove the fat, treated with ammonium hydroxide gas to kill germs, and then compressed into blocks that are frozen for later use. Although LFTB has never been sold directly to the public, it has been widely added to hamburgers and other prepared foods, and has been used in school lunches.
In 2012, after a number of news outlets ran stories raising an alarm about "pink slime," many nutritionists and chefs-among them the TV celebrity Jamie Oliver-led a campaign to ban lean finely textured beef. School food advocate Bettina Siegel collected 230,000 signatures on a letter to the USDA to ban LFTB. She wrote, "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 idea that children are passively sitting in a lunchroom eating what the government sees fit to feed them and McDonald's has chosen not to use it, but the government is still feeding it to them. That really got my ire." Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York Univer- sity said, "It sounds disgusting. A lot of people have been writing about it. Therefore, more people know about it, therefore more people are queasy about it."
In response to the uproar, McDonald's announced (as Siegel noted in her letter) that it was dropping LFTB from its hamburgers. Several national supermarkets, including Kroger and Safeway, also banned LFTB from their processed foods. Dropping demand for LFTB soon caused plant closures and layoffs of employees in the industry that produced this product. Beef Products Inc. (BPI), which had developed the process to create LFTB, closed three of its four LFTB facilities. AFA Foods filed for bankruptcy, citing financial damage caused by the "pink slime" media campaign, and Cargill, an international producer and marketer of food products, significantly scaled back production at its four beef processing facilities. These developments alarmed some food safety advocates, who feared that if LFTB were eliminated, bacteria-laden beef trimmings might be reintroduced into ham- burgers, just as they used to be, and the meat would be less safe for human consumption.
The founder of BPI, 69-year-old Eldon Roth, was heartbroken over the campaign against "pink slime." Roth had come up with the idea for LFTB in 1993 after four children died of E. coli poisoning from eating hamburgers purchased at a Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant. He received government approval to treat meat with a puff of ammonium hy- droxide after the fat was spun out. Ammonia occurs naturally in beef and other foods and has long been approved as an additive in many products, from cheese to pudding. Every carton of BPI beef was tested for E. coli and other dangerous microorganisms before being shipped to BPI customers. The editor of Cattle Buyers Weekly commented, "BPI has been in the forefront of food safety in the beef industry for a decade or more." Roth showed the same commitment to his employees as he did to product quality and vowed to keep paying his laid-off employees. But he faced the real possibility that he would be forced to let them go permanently. In 2012 BPI filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News seeking at least $1.2 billion in damages. BPI claimed that the broadcaster unfairly disparaged its beef ad- ditive by labeling it "pink slime."
There are many benefits to using LFTB in the beef preparation process. It allows beef producers to maximize the use of beef from cattle and minimize waste. According to in- dustry sources, LFTB recovers "10 to 12 pounds of edible lean beef from every animal,
Discussion Questions
and saves another 1.5 million animals from slaughter. It is a more sustainable way to pro- vide safe, quality, nutritious, abundant and affordable ground beef to Americans, who have made ground beef a dietary staple throughout the nation," explained Cargill's director of communications.
Cargill developed a video showing that LFTB is beef that is separated from fat, just as milk is separated from cream. Their webpage also tells the public, "[LFTB is] not scraps from the floor. It's not cartilage, tendons or other parts of the animal. It's not dog food. It's not filler. It's meat." The director of food safety and quality assurance at BPI explained, "We don't produce ‘pink slime.' We produce 100 percent quality lean beef. That's it. That whole thing [the campaign against pink slime] is a farce. There's no substance to it." A professor of dairy and animal science at the Pennsylvania State University also came to the defense of BPI. "This is a company with a long-standing reputation of doing things right, working with regulatory agencies and food safety people. From a technical or logical standpoint, these are the folks you'd hold up and say this is the way you do it."
The USDA found itself in the crosshairs of a contentious debate. Some members of Congress wrote to the agency, "If fast-food chains won't serve pink slime, why should school cafeterias?" But other members disagreed, writing to the Agriculture Secretary to state their view that the attacks against the quality of LFTB were coming from "a few over- zealous individuals in the media. LFTB is 100 percent beef, safe and cost effective . . . and should be promoted as such." The USDA announced that although it would not ban LFTD, it would allow school districts to opt out of purchasing products that contained "pink slime."
Sources: "Pink Slime: Ammonia Treated Ground Beef Becoming a Rallying Cry," Huffington Post, March 14, 2012, www .huffingtonpost.com; "Pink Slime in Ground Beef: What's the Big Deal?" CBS News, March 14, 2012, www.cbsnews.com; "USDA Announces Additional Choices for Beef Products in the Upcoming School Year," USDA News Release No. 0094.12, March 15, 2012, www.usda.gov; "Backlash to the ‘Pink Slime' Backlash," Time Moneyland, March 29, 2012, moneyland .time.com; "The Dilemma of Pink Slime: Cost of Culture?" SFGate.com, April 1, 2012, www.sfgate.com; "The Sliming of Punk Slime's Creator," Bloomberg Businessweek, April 12, 2012, www.businessweek.com; "Cargill: Decision by Retailers to Drop 'Pink Slime' Was 'Disappointing but Understandable,'" Food Navigator-USA, April 24, 2012, www.foodnavigator-usa
.com"; Congressman Want USDA Chief to Campaign in Support of 'Pink Slime,'" Food Poisoning Bulletin, April 24, 2012, foodpoisoningbulletin.com; and, "ABC Sued for 'Pink Slime' Defamation," The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2012, online.wsj.com.
1. After reading this case, should "pink slime" be banned as a hazardous food product or are the claims unfounded?
2. Develop a public relations strategy that BPI and other firms that manufacture LFTB could use to combat the bad publicity and efforts to ban the use of the product.
3. If BPI's founder were to conduct a press conference, what points should he emphasize to the media and convey to the public?
4. Besides a press conference, what other tools might BPI or other firms use to improve the public's opinion of their products?