The Yahoo headline makes it quite clear: “Seven Million Pounds of “Pink Slime” Beef Destined for National School Lunch Program.” I blogged about these pink slime-ammonia burgers back in February.
While the libertarianoids like to wax poetic about the free market-ness of McDonald’s and Taco Bell, here is the story of the real free market at work. Jamie Oliver, a celebrity chef, worked hard to expose the truth to the public about how the industrialized, corporate-socialist CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) meat industry was repurposing throwaway meat scrap as “lean beef trimmings” for the stakeholders of subsidized food such as McDonald’s and Taco Bell. While Oliver is not philosophically perfect in a libertarian sense, he has travelled around the world to teach people about choices between food vs. convenience. What a great thing for folks to learn. And then the media and ancestral health blogosphere caught on to the pink slime-o-rama, and suddenly, corporate benefactors of the cheap, garbage food were pressured to change their ways.
Here’s the real libertarian story. Give the facts, expose the scam, criticize the tricksters like McDonald’s and Taco Bell, and make it known that federal labeling laws favor their scams so that you, the consumer, do not know what you are putting in your body when you buy their corn-fed, subsidized slop. Then make the news go viral. And so, due to pressure from the public, both McDonald’s and Taco Bell announced they would stop using the scrap slime in the food they got you hooked on. That is the free market at work - arming people with intelligence so that they can make informed decisions and pressure companies to shape up and get straight. Still, McDonald’s lied to its customers, and no matter what the company did to try to wiggle its way out of trouble, the company was on a PR ride to hell.
Oh, and read this article on Minyanville.com to understand how the McDonald’s expansion – to sell more cheap, pink slime burgers – and “jobs program” was financed, in part, by the Federal Reserve in a quiet bailout (Fed purchase of commercial paper).
