'Pink Slime' Finding Its Way Into Nation's Ground Beef

It’s been nicknamed “pink slime,” the USDA has purchased seven million pounds of it this year for inclusion in school lunches and whatnot, and – perhaps most disgusting of all – it may be a secret ingredient added to the ground beef you buy at the grocery store or that is in hamburgers at the local fast food restaurant you frequent.

The food additive – officially (and seriously) called “lean finely textured beef,” and which federal law allows to make up as much as 15 percent of ground beef – “is a mixture of leftover trimmings, sinew, and other beef parts culled from a cow once the expensive and more recognizable cuts of meat have been harvested and sent to a butcher,” reported the Blaze. “The collection of leftovers is spun in a centrifuge to remove excess fat, washed in a disinfecting solution and then minced for use in various applications.”

Shockingly, these micro-ground odds and ends that used to be shipped to dog food manufacturers may be in as much as 70 percent of what passes as ground beef in America.

The good news, according to ABC News, is that a public media blitz by “celebrity chef” Jamie Oliver exposing the use of the disgusting – but apparently safe – meat byproduct in the food service industry convinced America’s favorite burger place, McDonald’s, to stop adding pink slime to its beef (it had used the product in its hamburgers since 2004). Burger King and Taco Bell said they would also drop the product from their meat. (Watch this short segment from Oliver’s Food Revolution TV show.