Bay Area Chains Listed Among Those Who Sell Meat Containing 'Pink Slime'
(CBS SF) - The Daily, the iPad newspaper from News Corp., has identified which supermarkets and retailers sell ground beef with a substance dubbed "pink slime," including some that operate in the Bay Area.
Pink slime is the meat filler made from slaughterhouse scraps that is treated with ammonia. The filler, treated with ammonium hydroxide gas, is used to destroy bacteria in raw meat. The process is banned in Canada and Great Britain and is forbidden in meat labeled organic in the U.S.
McDonalds and Taco Bell recently announced they would stop putting the additive into its hamburgers and food products. Last week, the USDA announced that school districts will be able to opt out of using meat treated with the ground beef filler known as Lean Finely Textured Beef or LFTB.
The Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto said it does not use pink slime. Meat in the Berkeley store is cut and ground to order. The artisan meat shop sells hamburger for $7 a pound.
There are big supermarkets that don't add pink slime. According to The Daily, Whole Foods and Costco have said they do not sell meat with pink slime. The stores that sell store-ground meat with pink slime, according to the Daily, are Target, Safeway, Walmart, and Albertsons.
In a response to CBS 5, Safeway said: "We are reviewing the issue now. However, we offer our customers a "choice of 100% USDA-approved ground beef products that do not contain LFTB. … we also sell traditional ground beef which may include LFTB."
Albertsons said: "We are committed to delivering safe, high quality products to our customers….while we do not add lean finely textured beef to products ground at our retail stores, it is used by many of our ground beef suppliers."
Read The Full Responses From Safeway And Albertsons
(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
