{"id":2664,"date":"2012-04-29T21:09:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T02:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/realfoodhouston.com\/?p=2664"},"modified":"2013-09-17T18:37:37","modified_gmt":"2013-09-17T23:37:37","slug":"forbes-contributors-call-food-activists-the-real-slime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/2012\/04\/29\/forbes-contributors-call-food-activists-the-real-slime\/","title":{"rendered":"Forbes contributors call food activists ‘The Real Slime’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ground<\/a>Henry Miller and Jeff Stier,\u00a0in their recent article<\/a>\u00a0at Forbes.com<\/a>\u00a0decry the use of the term ‘pink slime’<\/a> for “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB<\/a>), the industry-preferred euphemism for ammonia treated beef trimmings.\u00a0[I will use the\u00a0term LFTB throughout this post.]\u00a0In fact, they are so upset with the media and activists calling LFTB ‘pink slime’\u00a0that they resort to wild exaggeration, unsupported claims,\u00a0and incorrect statements to\u00a0emphasize their message.\u00a0 They say that “Anti-Technology Activists Are The Real Slime.”\u00a0That’s right, they are\u00a0calling people <\/em>slime.<\/p>\n

Why do they call us ‘The Real Slime.”\u00a0 Yes,\u00a0I am\u00a0a REAL FOOD activist<\/strong>, and I don’t approve of LFTB or its other ‘food’ cousins’ and according to Henry Miller and Jeff Stier I AM SLIME<\/strong>.\u00a0 They say we’re ignorant and base our views on intuition, not on science or facts.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 They say that the way LFTB is produced ‘sounds unappetizing.’\u00a0 That sure is an understatement, if there ever was one.\u00a0 They don’t mention that\u00a0Beef Products, Inc.<\/a>, a maker of LFTB, uses\u00a0ammonium hydroxide<\/em> on\u00a0the beef scrapings to kill bacteria; they just say it is treated “to make it inhospitable to bacteria.”\u00a0 “Inhospitable to bacteria”–another euphemism!\u00a0 Actually, the article never once uses the word ammonia, but\u00a0they claim that this process, again never mentioning the word ammonia, is “both healthful and safe.”\u00a0 Where’s their scientific proof of that?\u00a0 While they never provide proof of the safety and healthfulness of LFTB, they do provide ‘scientific’ backup for why the process is used–to reduce processing costs.\u00a0 They quote Jim Dickson, a professor\u00a0from Iowa State University, saying,\u00a0” . . . using this process with the fat trim recovers 10-12 pounds of additional lean meat from each carcass.\u00a0 . . . we can meet consumer demands with lower prices and fewer cattle.”<\/p>\n

They try\u00a0to justify foods like\u00a0LFTB through comparison\u00a0to traditional meat dishes that they say have the same “yuk factor.”\u00a0 They imply that the processing of LFTB is no better and no worse than the way these other “yuk”\u00a0foods are made, such as\u00a0 scrapple<\/a>, head cheese<\/a>, and haggis<\/a>.\u00a0 You can use the links to find out more about these foods, but they all\u00a0make use of\u00a0nutritious parts of the animal, such as organ meats, bones,\u00a0and animal gelatins.\u00a0 Also, yes, they do make good use of the whole animal, which may seem strange to many modern Americans who are only used to eating the muscle meat of an animal and may have never eaten organ meats or bone broths.\u00a0 These traditional meat preparations have been highly prized by some cultures for centuries.\u00a0 Although I do eat organ meats and bone broths, I am not familiar with the specific foods they mention, but I could not find any\u00a0indication\u00a0that their processing requires\u00a0ammonia,\u00a0other chemicals, or, in fact, any preparation step or ingredient\u00a0not commonly used at home.\u00a0 Those traditional, so-called “yuk”\u00a0foods\u00a0were boiled, cooked, or baked, not gassed, ammoniated, or industrialized.\u00a0 Could you ammoniate your beef at home?\u00a0\u00a0I would guess\u00a0not!<\/p>\n

Another justification of LFTB is that it “has been used for decades by schools, leading fast-food outlets and major supermarket chains . . .”\u00a0 Does the fact that it’s been\u00a0eaten for so long by an unknowing public make it good?\u00a0 Make it okay?\u00a0 There’s not much to say about this statement, because,\u00a0the simple\u00a0fact that it has been used for a long time doesn’t prove anything, either good or bad, other than it isn’t an outright poison.<\/p>\n

At this point in the article, the authors again resort to name calling, saying about the LFTB issue: “Know-nothing<\/em> food activists have had a field day.\u00a0 The real (and ridiculous<\/em>) agenda of many who are trashing LFTB is to get us all to go organic.”\u00a0 [Emphasis mine.]\u00a0 Now we’re “Know-nothing food activists” and we’re doing it just to get people to eat organic? Really?\u00a0 So I’m a food activist just because<\/em> I want everybody<\/em> to eat organic?\u00a0 Could there just maybe be another reason I don’t approve of LFTB?\u00a0 Where in there is my concern for health and nutrition?\u00a0\u00a0 They go on to say that “all the activists seem to want us to eat only New York strip steaks and filet mignon from organic, grass-fed, free-range cattle that were raised listening to Peter, Paul and Mary protest songs.”\u00a0 All the activists?\u00a0 I’m just one of many food and health activists who don’t want to eat LFTB or similar foods, and most of us would never<\/em><\/strong> recommend that the only meats that should be eaten are steaks and filet mignon.\u00a0 Many of us have learned that some of the best nutrition from animal foods\u00a0comes from\u00a0the organ meats and broths made with the bones.\u00a0(They’re\u00a0usually much cheaper to buy and prepare, as well.)\u00a0 So why would we want anyone<\/em> to eat only<\/em> expensive muscle meat?\u00a0 Yes, we do recommend eating meat from grassfed cows–because that is their natural diet.\u00a0 The cows are healthier when eating naturally and living outdoors on pasture; therefore, their meat is healthier for us too.\u00a0 Cows raised in confinement (CAFO<\/a>) on grains are sickly and so poorly nourished that they require antibiotics just to keep them alive long enough to make a profit.\u00a0 How can eating meat from unhealthy cows be good for us?\u00a0 Meat from\u00a0grassfed cows would not\u00a0be so expensive if grassfed cattle ranchers were as heavily promoted and supported\u00a0by the government as are the CAFO\u00a0facilities.<\/p>\n

In their next\u00a0attempt to justify the use of LFTB, they mention an outbreak of Salmonella<\/a> from frozen raw yellowfin tuna.\u00a0 The contamination was from a tuna product called “tuna scrape” which they now “christen\u00a0. . . ‘red slime.'”\u00a0 Yes, that is terrible, but how\u00a0could\u00a0bringing up\u00a0another unacceptable, unsafe\u00a0process justify\u00a0LFTB?<\/p>\n

The authors now\u00a0go back to their name-calling.\u00a0 Activists are\u00a0said to be sanctimonious<\/a> toward food, a term\u00a0which, according to\u00a0Merriam-Webster, is\u00a0clearly\u00a0unflattering–“hypocritically pious or devout.”\u00a0 They criticize activists who think that we should spend more time, and money, on food preparation for our health’s sake, implying that\u00a0we are being unfair to poor people “who can’t afford organic free-range guinea hens or morel mushrooms ($1,280 a pound at your local Whole Foods).”\u00a0 This is another gross exaggeration.\u00a0\u00a0You absolutely don’t<\/em> need to be able to afford these foods to eat REAL nutritious food.\u00a0 It isn’t necessary to be rich to eat healthily, but it is necessary to spend your food dollars wisely–skip the nutrient-empty foods like soft drinks, chips, sugar cereals, and\u00a0snack foods–buy fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses, eggs,\u00a0and milk.<\/p>\n

You’d think they’d gone so far over the top at this point that they would’ve fallen down the other side, but no, there’s more!\u00a0\u00a0 Henry Miller and Jeff Stier\u00a0praise and quote Dick Taverne, author of The March of Unreason<\/em>, as decrying “organic food activists’ resistance to many proven technologies, including agricultural chemicals and food irradiation, but he singles out in particular their intractable objection to genetic engineering\u00a0of plants and animals.”\u00a0\u00a0It is\u00a0scientific<\/em> fact that independent<\/em> research (not funded by the biotech\u00a0industry itself)\u00a0by respectable scientists\u00a0has\u00a0found significant problems with the safety of genetically engineered (GE)\u00a0crops that at least deserve further study before allowing further spread of potential harm to humans and animals.\u00a0 These\u00a0scientists include Dr. Arpad Pusztai<\/a> , Dr. Andres E. Carrasco<\/a>, and Dr. Don Huber<\/a>, among others.\u00a0Taverne uses the ploy often\u00a0claimed by avid supporters of GE crops–that GE is no different from the genetic modification that humans have been applying to plants for thousands of years.\u00a0\u00a0If his confusion of\u00a0genetic modification with genetic engineering\u00a0is not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the subject, then he must not know much about either genetic modification or genetic engineering.\u00a0 He\u00a0calls\u00a0the arguments of those who are concerned about GE crops “perverse” and “utterly wrong-headed.”\u00a0\u00a0It is fairly obvious even to someone outside of science that the\u00a0genetic modifications used all those many years do not compare at all to genetic engineering which absolutely requires a sophisticated lab and billions of research dollars to accomplish.\u00a0 Most of the genetic\u00a0modifications<\/em> they so easily say are just the same as GE\u00a0were done by farmers,\u00a0did not require a lab–at least for most of those thousands of years,\u00a0and they never\u00a0combined two incompatible species to generate a living organism.\u00a0 However, genetic engineering<\/em> melds fish and plants, spiders and goats,\u00a0bacteria and plants, in ways that are completely impossible outside of a lab.\u00a0 The results of such combinations are not yet predictable or even completely controllable by those who engineer them.\u00a0 For more information about the problems scientists have found with genetically engineered plants and animals, read my previous posts: It’s Not Pretty Behind the Biotech Veil, an Interview with Howard Vlieger<\/a>, and What Does Genetically Engineered (or GMO) Mean<\/a>?<\/p>\n

When\u00a0people don’t\u00a0have a logical, rational argument to defend\u00a0what they believe, they unfortunately often resort to calling the other side by derogatory names.\u00a0 It sure looks like that’s what has happened here.\u00a0 The\u00a0authors close their article by adding one last insulting name to their list–“food activists are the loudest [quacks].”\u00a0 Yes, they\u00a0call us not only\u00a0“The Real Slime”\u00a0 but also\u00a0“the loudest [quacks].”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Henry Miller and Jeff Stier call people who want to be healthy by eating nutritious, safe food by\u00a0all of\u00a0these names: ‘the real slime,’ know-nothing, ridiculous,\u00a0sanctimonious, and now quacks–the loudest quacks.\u00a0 Why do they call us\u00a0insulting names?\u00a0 It’s because we don’t agree with their support of using LFTB, genetically combining unlike species, and fooling people into eating cheap, unhealthy food.\u00a0 The authors even name several food activists for particular scorn, including Michele Simon, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters. But they call “brilliant” the work of someone (Dick Taverne) who can’t seem to distinguish between genetic modification<\/em> and genetic engineering<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By the way, I think it’s important to understand the background of the authors.\u00a0 Henry I. Miller, according to his bio with\u00a0the Forbes article, is a biomedical scientist; FDA<\/em> drug regulator and scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.\u00a0 He says that during his time at the FDA<\/em>, he was a “medical reviewer for the first genetically engineered drugs . . . was the founding director of the FDA<\/em>‘s Office of Biotechnology.”\u00a0 [emphasis mine] He has “written four books and more that 1,200 articles.”\u00a0 His “most frequent topics include genetic engineering, pharmaceutical development, and the debunking of junk science.”\u00a0 He ends his bio with this somewhat surprising statement: “I’m intolerant of dishonesty and hypocrisy and expose them at every opportunity.”\u00a0 It seems to me that, if he is truly “intolerant of dishonesty and hypocrisy” that\u00a0he has provided himself with another debunking opportunity–his own diatribe.<\/p>\n

No bio is provided with the Forbes article for Jeff Stier; however, a Google search gives this information:\u00a0 Jeff Stier has a\u00a0law degree from the Benjamin N. Cordozo School of Law.\u00a0 He\u00a0is “a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and heads its Risk Analysis Division. He was the Associate Director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) from 1997-2010. . . . Mr. Stier also worked both in the office of the Mayor and in Corporation Counsel’s office in the Giuliani administration in New York City. His responsibilities included planning environmental agency programs, legal analysis of proposed legislation, and health policy.”<\/p>\n

Update September 17, 2013<\/strong><\/em>: “\u2018Pink slime\u2019 returns to school lunches in 4 more states”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Miller and Jeff Stier,\u00a0in their recent article\u00a0at Forbes.com\u00a0decry the use of the term ‘pink slime’ for “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB), the industry-preferred euphemism for ammonia treated beef trimmings.\u00a0[I will use the\u00a0term LFTB throughout this post.]\u00a0In fact, they are …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,63,59,80,172,18,19,9],"tags":[25,64,405,41,84,40,31,45],"class_list":["post-2664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-freedom","category-food-safety","category-gmos","category-health","category-nutrition","category-organic-food","category-real-food","category-traditional-food","tag-food-rights-2","tag-food-safety-2","tag-gmos","tag-grassfed-beef","tag-health-2","tag-organic","tag-sustainable-farming","tag-traditional-food-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p70SEj-GY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2664"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2696,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions\/2696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}