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A concerned reader sent me a link to an article today that absolutely grossed me out and I thought I had seen it all where processed factory food is concerned.
Advanced Meat Recovery. AKA “Pink Slime”
This picture is of mechanically separated chicken meat, also called Advanced Meat Recovery (yes, you read that right) before it is made into chicken nuggets, bologna, hot dogs, salami – uh, shall I continue? Companies that produce processed food with this nauseating ingredient try very hard not to let photos like this get out to the public for obvious reasons.
According to Fooducate, this chicken paste is the result of cleaning every bit of meat off the chicken bones by passing it through a high-pressure sieve.
It tastes horrible, so artificial flavors like MSG and many other additives must be mixed in to make it palatable. The color is very odd and unappetizing requiring the cover of artificial colors.
It is covered in bacteria, so the paste must be soaked in ammonia to degerm it (see comment below from Stanley Fishman Esq. discrediting denials of this from Snopes).
Anyone up for the fast-food drive-through?
Seeing a photo like this, I am so grateful for my local poultry farm! The chickens are happy, run free, and are fed GMO-free grain to supplement their natural foraging diet.
What Restaurants Use Pink Slime?
It’s not just fast food joints that prefer to use this food-like substance.
It seems that Subway chicken sandwiches may be channeling pink slime too according to a report which conducted tests on the chains “oven-roasted” chicken sandwiches and strips.
Believe it or not, they tested less than 50% actual meat according to CBC Marketplace.
Note that things didn’t used to be this bad! Back in the “good ‘ole days” of fast food, the stuff was actually Real Food that was just cooked fast!
References
(1) PHOTO: Pre-Chicken Nugget Meat Paste, AKA Mechanically Separated Poultry
(2) Guess What’s in the Picture? (Foodlike Substance)
Hi Sarah, I saw the photo on someone's Facebook page and my thoughts are: CAFO meat bad, for many reasons, pastured meat good.
BUT…as far as this idea of Advanced Meat Recovery goes, I am wondering, if you're going to eat CAFO meat, does it matter if it's ground to a paste first? The Facebook person was saying the whole (I assume plucked) chicken goes through a sieve, including bones, eyes, organs, skin. Is that correct, or is it just that the muscle meat and bone go through a sieve? I am not clear whether they're saying there is bone in with the meat, or just meat.
But WAPF encourages eating the whole bird…so assuming you have a CAFO chicken here, is there anything worse about eating a slurry of the whole bird vs. just the muscle meat? Might you actually get some cartilage and organ meat that would be a good thing?
Why does it taste so bad, if none of the component parts of the bird would taste bad? I wonder if it's artificially flavored mainly because it's a way of standardizing the taste year round and worldwide, which they are so big on.
Why is it crawling with bacteria any more than the cut up whole chicken would be? (Or is ALL the chicken in the stores treated with ammonia?)
I'm not defending industrial meat, just wondering how this is worse than ANY industrial meat.
I had read about ground beef being treated with ammonia, and so it wouldn't surprise me if chicken was too.
But, say you took a pastured chicken and put it through a Magicmix or whatever Jamie Oliver used. Problem? Is it that different than making head cheese or sausage? Seems like it might be better for you than just muscle meat, if you're getting organs and skin blended in. (I don't know how it tastes; I don't like the taste of some organ meats, but that's why spices and such are added to sausages, right?)
Disgusting. Glad I make any "chicken nuggets" we consume at home with pastured chicken. They are delicious. My children LOVE them. They look at fast food nuggets (when friends are eating them usually) like they are not even food. Maybe because they're not.
I find it interesting that McDonald's states that "it no longer" uses the Advanced Recovery System meat which means they definitely used to use it! I guess when pictures like this get out, the Corporate PR office go into overtime damage control mode. I would be pretty certain that whatever non Advanced Recovery System meat they switched to is probably just as bad like the switch from trans fats to interestified fat for the french fries which is arguably even more damaging to health.
It appears Europe has similar issues with food, so this article highlights. Ammonia or no ammonia, the moral of this tale is: eat well but above all know what you are eating! guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jul/08/bse.foodanddrink
Sarah Faith, Snopes.com publishes a lot of articles that defend the food industry. They have no credibility with me.
According to the New York Times and the Organic consumers Union, A pink slime is made from beef scraps that is treated with ammonia.
The USDA approves this treatment because it is supposed to kill e coli bacteria. That is an undisputed fact. According to these sources, that pink slime is in most of the ground beef in the supermarket. I have no difficulty believing the same process is used with recovered chicken meat. Even the Snopes article admits that ammonia has been found in the chicken meat, but they claim it is not intentional, and is from ammonia dripping form the cooling system. As far as I am concerned, if it is there, it is there. And nobody in their right mind should want to eat ammonia.
That is so gross. I am glad that I am vegan! My last bite of meat that turned me off was a hot dog 18 years ago. I guess my instincts were good! I can't believe people feed that stuff to their children. Meat eaters definitely need to go organic, pasture fed!
Ew, I’m not surprised a hot dog turned you off of meat. Although I respect your choice to become a vegan, I certainly wouldn’t, if only because I love my raw ice cream too much! 😀 I appreciate your acknowledgement that local, organic, pastured meats aren’t even in the same class as the gross man-altered substance Big Food likes to call “chicken.”
Have you vetted this? I saw somewhere that the ammonia part was a hoax. You should definitely check it out asap lest you undermine your credibility.
Actually in the article that you shared, snopes just confirms that ammonia is regularly used to clean the meat, all they say is that it is not “routine” to soak chicken in it. The reason you don’t see ammonia on the label is because it is not required to put non-food grade items on food labels.
Actually, in the article that was shared, snopes confirms that you are incorrect;
Occasionally, ammonia accidentally leaks onto food and contaminates it. It is NOT used to “Clean the chicken”.
I suggest you brush up on your reading skills.
Here's an update per the McNuggets, again from HuffPost:
UPDATE, 10/4/10: The story has been amended to reflect that although mass produced chicken nuggets at large may contain mechanically separated chicken, McDonald's famous McNuggets no longer do contain "mechanically separated poultry as defined by the federal government. The USDA now requires foods with mechanically separated poultry to be labeled as containing "mechanically separated chicken or turkey" in their ingredients lists.
I thought it was soft serve strawberry ice cream when I first saw it!
Sarah Faith, not positive about the ammonia .. I took the info from HuffPost – see from link.
Wow! I saw Jamie Oliver's version of this process on Food Revolution — and his was much cleaner, actually. Yuck! Does anyone want to eat anything made from an "Advanced Meat Recovery" process? Sounds like something dug out of the trash!