Tom Laskawy writes in Grist that we have a lot more to learn about what's in the meat we buy.
The meat industry has admitted that what is used in Pink Slime which is using to preserve and disinfect meat is none other than ammonium hydroxide. Yup, same ammonium hydroxide used in cleaning products. The only difference is the household cleaner is a liquid and pink slime is treated with a gas.
What pink slime represents is an open admission by the food industry that it is hard-pressed to produce meat that won’t make you sick. Because, I hate to break it to you folks, but ammonium hydroxide is just one in a long list of unlabeled chemical treatments used on almost all industrial meat and poultry.
Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News dug up this United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) document [PDF], which lists dozens of chemicals that processors can apply to meat without any labeling requirement. Things like calcium hypochlorite (also used to bleach cotton and clean swimming pools), hypobromous acid (also used as a germicide in hot tubs), DBDMH (or 1,3-dibromo-5,5-dimethylhydantoin, which is also used in water treatment), and chlorine dioxide (also used to bleach wood pulp), to name just a few.
[..]
In short, they took meat that was too dangerous to feed to humans, disinfected it so thoroughly that a block of the stuff will make your eyes water, and then celebrated the fact that they’d created a two-fer (it’s a food! it’s a disinfectant!). The industry embraced their creation so completely that around 70 percent of all supermarket ground beef now contains the stuff. But this goes way beyond hamburger. As Tom Philpott points out, pink slime is used in a huge variety of products including “hot dogs, lunch meats, chili, sausages, pepperoni, retail frozen entrees, roast beef, and canned foods.” By industry standards, it is nothing short of a food “intervention” success story.
Oh, I know many of you now will say but what about all the meat that's locally raised and natural etc. Well, really there's
not that much of it because of costs and land and water resources involved.
Factory farming now accounts for more than 99 percent of all farmed animals raised and slaughtered in the United States.3 (Virtually all seafood comes to us by way of industrial fishing or factory fish farms.)
If 'Pink Slime' is removed from the equation you can bet that the meat industry will have a subsitution to do the same job. Because it's
only way the industrial meat industry can prevent its products from making people sick.