Beef Products Inc. (BPI), the South Dakota-based meat processing company at the center of 2012’s “pink slime” controversy, just won a long-sought semantic victory. For years, the company has argued that its signature product is safe, wholesome, and not unlike everyday burger meat. Now, BPI has enlisted a powerful ally in its effort to recoup its image and reclassify its product: the federal government.
After a months-long evaluation, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) determined in December that BPI’s signature product—the offering famously called “pink slime” in an ABC News exposé that got the network in a lot of trouble—can be labeled “ground beef.” Legally speaking, it’s now no different from ordinary hamburger, and could even be sold directly to the public.
“After reviewing BPI’s submission of a new product and new production process, FSIS determined that the product meets the regulatory definition of ground beef under the law in 9 CFR 319.15(a) and may be labeled accordingly,” a FSIS spokesperson told me, in an emailed statement.
FSIS calls it a “new” product because BPI’s process has evolved substantially since 2012—though how exactly it has changed is not immediately clear, for reasons I’ll explain.
In case you missed the 2012 ABC News segment that first introduced the term “pink slime” to the public, or don’t remember details from the wave of coverage that followed, here’s some background.
As cattle carcasses are turned into steaks at a processing plant, knife-wielding workers cut fatty edges off the meat. These carcass cuttings, or “trim”—about 1/3 of each animal’s weight —contain small portions of edible meat, which can be used to make ground beef. The challenge is that hamburger makers always have a target fat content in mind. According to USDA, ground beef can’t contain more than 30 percent fat, while “lean” ground beef, for instance, must contain less than 22.5 percent fat. How to make sure that the standard trim coming off cattle—typically 50 percent meat, 50 percent fat—ultimately results in a product that hits the precise fat content required. That’s where BPI comes in.
BPI has a symbiotic relationship with a Tyson Foods plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, where its facility was built right next to the slaughterhouse. (In the wake of the ABC News report, the company’s orders plunged from 5 million pounds a week to 1.5 million, ultimately forcing BPI to closes the three other plants it maintained across the country.) Tyson’s beef trim is ferried over from the kill floor to BPI’s plant by conveyor, where it’s warmed to about 100 degrees and sent through a centrifuge that separates the fat from the meat. The liquified fat can then be sold as tallow, while the resulting meat—which the industry has called “lean finely textured beef,” or “boneless beef trimmings” in the past—is nearly fatless. BPI says its product is 95 percent lean, so only five percent fat.
That product is then sterilized with a strong puff of ammonia gas to kill pathogens, as beef trimmings are especially susceptible to contamination. (Ammonia might sound scary, but it’s a common food additive and processing agent that’s generally regarded to be safe in small amounts.) From there, it’s sold to meatpackers who mix it in with their ground beef to lower the fat content as desired. For decades, it was a booming business, and BPI had claimed that its product was present in over 70 percent of ground beef sold in the U.S. before 2012.
Still, when beef is not just “ground,” but rendered into fine paste through an intensely mechanical process, the question remains: What should we call it? If it can’t be called “pink slime,” what words should we use?
Since 1994, the government’s stance has been clear. Lean finely textured beef (LFTB) has been a “qualified component” of hamburger, meaning it can be included in ground beef without being independently disclosed. But it could not itself be called ground beef, suggesting that, in the eyes of regulators it was something else—a padding or additive, but not the real deal.
Some at USDA weren’t comfortable even with that classification. Though ABC made the term “pink slime” famous, the network didn’t actually coin it. The term originated with a USDA microbiologist, David Zirnstein, who used it in a 2002 email to agency staff. According to a 2009 report from The New York Times’s Michael Moss—part of a series of articles on food safety in the ground beef industry that would ultimately earn him a Pulitzer Prize—Zirnstein was troubled by the production method. “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling,” he wrote in the email, according to Moss’s report.
Several years later, ABC released the now-infamous segment that lead to the “pink slime” hysteria of 2012. BPI argued that the network’s characterization was false and defamatory, ultimately suing it for 1.9 billion dollars. That lawsuit was settled out of court in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, though The Chicago Tribune and other outlets have reported a settlement of at least $177 million paid out by ABC so far. ABC, according to the terms of its settlement, admits no wrongdoing and has stood by its report. And though BPI has managed to recoup some of the economic damagefrom the fallout, most Americans still think of “lean finely textured beef” as “pink slime.”
