I guess labeling anything Pink Slime insures its rejection, particularly when it's in food you eat. The media and social media viral storm over a product that has been part of our food for years has been a boon for all who know that many practices of industrial food production are ecologically, nutritionally, and ethically awful. But the production and use of the meat product called Pink Slime is not one of them.
If you haven't heard the term refers to processed meat trimmings. These are the parts cut away from steaks, roasts and other cuts containing much of the excess fat and the meat cut away with the fat. This meat is of higher grade than the meat that goes into your hamburger meat. Treatment involves citric acid (naturally occurs in citrus fruits, unnaturally in your soft drink and naturally in every cell in your body that uses glucose) and ammonia which is not only an industrial chemical but also produced in your body as a natural by product of protein metabolism and is converted to urea before excretion. When it is used to process the meat trimmings it helps separate the fat from the lean meat and gets rid of some of the collagen fibers supporting the lean meat, hence the semi-liquid state. The ammonia evaporates and goes into the environmental nitrogen cycle. And the combination of citrate and ammonia kills all the bacteria, both pathogens as well as the non-pathogenic bacteria that eventually makes hamburger go bad, so this product is microbiologically cleaner than hamburger or regular meat and is certainly leaner (more protein, less fat) than hamburger or probably even well marbled steaks. Other additives used to up protein content of hamburgers like soy bean flour add bulk along with the protein but also keep the fat that would drain away during cooking in the burger and therefore goes into your body.
So what does this have to do with environmental issues? The amount of extra beef required to replace the banning of this product amounts to 1,500,000 more cows. This is a million and a half more cows belching methane. All of these cows will be fed feed corn and grains grown instead of corn and grains for raised for human consumption. So all this pollution from the diesel fuel for the tractors goes for the inherently inefficient of production of beef protein rather than plant protein.
So all who are going YUCK without thinking about the entire picture should also think about the hundreds of jobs lost and the eventual disposition of these unused trimmings in land fills creating even more methane as it rots to no good purpose.
I really expect flames over this diary even though I am not an apologist for industrial agriculture, just trying to bring facts to a mostly emotional driven discussion.