Pure Ground Beef

Photo by Jeremy Vohwinkle, genxfinance.com

Pure Ground Beef

When I was a kid I used to love beef, mostly in the form of cheeseburgers. I liked meatloaf too, but not as much as I liked cheeseburgers. We also put ground beef on our pizza, in our tacos, and occasionally with some Hamburger Helper. As a child, the one problem I had with the beef was the bits of gristle and things I’d run across periodically. After a few times of having to remove of piece of something from my mouth, I’d pretty much be done eating. I always chalked it up as something that happens when you eat ground beef. Perhaps I was wrong.

Recently there’s been an article floating around the Internet about pink slime: http://yhoo.it/zhBiKB. (I’ll spare you the picture.) Apparently, the FDA allows lean finely textured beef (LFTB) to be marketed and sold as 100% beef. It’s reported that the USDA plans to purchase 7 million pounds of beef with this LFTB for school lunches. So what is LFTB? It sounds like a healthy alternative to a high-fat beef. Actually, it’s the reject pieces from the butcher like connective tissue and excess fat. At one time these pieces were only used in cooking oil and dog food. Now, they are approved for human consumption—after they’ve been treated with ammonia, of course, because it’s in the rejected pieces where pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella are typically found in high concentrations. “It’s pink, therefore it’s meat,” our government scientists claim. Gotta love those government scientists.

Now, I don’t know if this LFTB was around when I was eating my burgers as a youth. Maybe I was biting into some connective tissue. Or maybe even something worse. Have you ever seen Jamie Oliver demonstrate what chicken nuggets are really made of? http://youtu.be/XKSoiDtdi9s... Eeeww!

Rather than abandon burgers and tacos and meatloaf, I think I’ll look to a healthier alternative: pure beef. According to Lynne Curry, author or Pure Beef: An Essential Guide to Artisan Meat with Recipes for Every Cut, before it was associated with heart attacks—and ages before mad cow disease, E. coli, environmental degradation, and global warming—beef was a wholesome, nourishing, and desirable food source. Today, 95 percent of the annual calf crop are taken from the farms to feedlots where they stand around all day being fed a blend of cereal grains and by-products. No wonder they’re fattier. And then their connective tissue and fat and by-products are ground up for our consumption. No wonder we have health problems.

When looking for beef, consider grass-fed beef. It is higher in omega-3 fatty acid and has more antioxidants, which protect cells against cancer-causing free radicals, than the feedlot variety. If you can’t find or afford grass-fed beef, learn how to grind your own hamburger at home. You save money and ensure that you are at least getting pure ground beef, and then maybe your hamburger won’t need a helper.

~Geoffrey