So much of this type of 'journalistic' attacks on foods, crops, people who grow and/or produce them seem driven by a desire to make a name for the 'journalist', and/or to assure only the foods that individual or group wants the rest of us to be able to eat, use, grow, or produce.
Having a friend who knows the man who started the plant and invented the processes to salvage perfectly good beef to make LFTB, I firmly believe that was a severe wrong committed by several people and businesses determined to 'save us from ourselves', so to speak.
They use various forms of sleight of hand, implications and outright deceptions to make it appear that a particularly ugly mess was the result of deliberate attempts to fool people into believing a dirty bunch of beef off the cutting floor was being foisted onto unsuspecting consumers.
The pink mush a so called reporter mixed in some sort of bucket, claiming it to be the beef, pouring household ammonia into the bucket with the mush and stirring it, was actually concocted with chicken, NOT beef. Of course the ammoniated gas government approved and commonly used to kill germs in many food products is a far different product than the liquid ammonia many of us still use for some cleaning jobs. But that didn't matter to the 'journalists' bent on eliminating foods they say shouldn't be eaten.
Even worse, imo, is the USDA employee who began calling the LFTB "pink slime", because he had to know better.
What I appreciate is the man determined to find a better way than virtually throwing out good pieces of beef because it was not economically feasible to salvage it due to high costs of hand trimming the meat when cutting steaks, roasts, and other higher priced cuts of beef. It simply was too difficult to cut is out of the fatty areas, UNTIL the method using slight heat was developed to mechanically separate it.
There was and still is high consumer demand for lower fat ground beef. While many of us do not believe the higher fat beef is harmful, many people either do believe it, or they don't like the flavor or mouth feel of a lot of fat.....and why shouldn't we all be able to get the product we want????? Particularly without some propagandists using false information to frighten those who are in-informed or uncertain what to believe.
mrj