Cargill has announced it will be labeling any beef products
it markets that contains Finely-Textured Lean Beef, otherwise notorious as “pink
slime”.
It’s about two years since the “pink slime’ controversy hit
the global news media, prompting public disgust, an immediate decline in sales and
financial hardships for the companies that were extracting it from beef that
would have otherwise been discarded as byproducts.
It’s never been approved for sale in Canada, however, it’s
not clear how the Canadian government has managed to keep it out of the nation’s
supply of meat products from the U.S.
Cargill has set up a special website to provide information
on its labeling initiative - GroundBeefAnswers.com.
Cargill is also updating its traceback
protocols and applying new labels to its ground beef.
In Canada, Cargill owns Excel Beef at High
River, Alta., and Better Beef at Guelph.
Meanwhile, the Canadian and U.S. governments
have still not required mandatory labeling for mechanically-tenderized beef.
Those steaks and roasts are as riskly as
hamburger for harbouring harmful bacteria deep inside the product. Hamburger,
however, is known to most consumers to be risky and they cook it to
bacteria-killing temperatures.
That’s not the case for steaks and roasts that
some consumers prefer to eat rare, which means interior temperatures are not
high enough to kill harmful bacteria that might have been shoved there by
mechanical tenderizing that consumers would not know about.
