ABC News’ recently released report on “pink slime” – a catchy name for beef trimmings sprayed with ammonia and frequently added to ground beef as filler – has caused an overwhelming outpour against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in both traditional and social media. Critics have raised concerns about both the safety of the product and the misleading way in which it has been labeled (or, more appropriately, not been labeled), and movements have been made to petition for its ban.
But I believe this outrage is misdirected.
Pink slime, despite its headline-worthy nickname, is hardly the worst of the problems facing the meat industry in the United States. In fact, it’s less a problem than it is the solution to a problem – albeit an arguably misguided one.
According to Marion Nestle, a food studies professor at New York University, the beef trimmings that comprise pink slime recover an average of 10 to 12 pounds of edible, safe meat product from every animal slaughtered, thereby saving an additional 1.5 million animals from slaughter each year.
Now for all you ethical vegetarians, that’s 1.5 million sentient lives. But if you don’t have qualms with the principles of a carnivorous diet – and that’s fine with me, I don’t either – this is still an important number. If 1.5 million sentient lives equals a whole bucketful of bovine emotions, it equals billions of buckets full of natural resources.
Research from Michigan State University has shown the average steer requires 2.5 million gallons of water before it is brought to slaughter. This means the use of pink slime in ground beef saves 3.75 trillion gallons of water per year.
As a point of comparison, the United Nations has suggested each person requires at least 20 liters (about 5.3 gallons) of clean water per day to ensure a basic livelihood. Based on this estimate, that 3.75 trillion gallons of water saved yearly by pink slime is enough to sustain the entire population of India for about 20 months.
But producing meat doesn’t just require water – it also depends on energy, and a lot of it. So if 40 calories of fossil fuel are needed to produce one calorie of beef protein, then it requires about 25,000 calories of fossil fuel to produce a pound of 95 percent lean ground beef. If pink slime saves 11 pounds of meat per cow times the 34 million cows slaughtered in the U.S. per year, it then saves about 9.15×1012 calories of fossil fuels per year. That’s about 36 trillion BTUs, or British thermal units, the energy equivalent of about 290 million gallons of gasoline.
I am not an advocate for the use of pink slime, and I don’t think ammonia should be put into meat any more than steroids should. But I do fully support any movement to counteract the vast inefficiencies and resource misappropriation inherent in this country’s meat production system. Pink slime, for better or for worse, seems to do this.
But if you can’t reconcile those 3.75 trillion gallons of water with the idea of eating mystery meat, maybe forgo a hamburger once in a while. You’ll be 100 percent safe from pink slime, and that four-ounce serving of beef left unconsumed will save 6,800 calories of fossil fuels. That’s the energy equivalent of 18 straight hours of window-unit air conditioning and the water equivalent of 25 10-minute showers.
Alex Leston is a freshman agriculture and resource economics major. She can be reached at leston@umdbk.com.
