Great news for people who don't like eating disgusting liquified cow slurry: the company behind our country's pink slime nightmare is shutting down its crap factories. Three down, one to go. Will our nation ever be free from the slime?
The Detroit Free Press reports the closing of the majority of BPI's shit-meat empire, which shutters plants in Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kansas, and Waterloo Iowa—one factory in Iowa will stay humming at "reduced capacity." Operations at these plants were already "suspended," but now they'll be closed for good. Let's hope giant iron locks are placed across the doors to prevent the 650 people who once cranked out this bile (seen above in nasty pellet form) from ever taking to their posts again.
Of course, those people are now out of jobs, and it wasn't their idea to manufacture the food equivalent of a snuff film:
LFTB is a beef product developed by Beef Products, Inc. (BPI), in 1991 to provide more domestic lean beef. BPI purchases beef trimmings, mostly 50% lean or less, from USDAinspected beef processing plants, heats the trimmings, and sends them through a centrifuge process that separates the fat and the meat. The resulting product is LFTB that is 94% to 97% lean beef, according to BPI. In addition to developing the process to extract the meat from beef trimmings, BPI developed a process that uses ammonium gas (anhydrous ammonia) as an antimicrobial intervention.
And then they freeze it! And then BPI shrugged its shoulders, lit a $100 bill with an obese American child, and coined its latest corporate catchphrase/PR Bay of Pigs, "Beef is beef." Yes, until it's taken from the undesirable scraps of a cow, spun through a centrifuge, bombarded with gas, and then frozen.
"It's always sad when people are put out of work," says one nutrition academic. "But this company, they could have handled the whole situation differently." Yes, like not putting this regurgitated cow byproduct in our Happy Meals and school lunches to begin with. It only seems like a matter of time until that last plant implodes under the weight of its own food war crimes and financial impossibility—it'll be like the lunchtime equivalent of Bastille Day. [Freep]
Photo via Jim Cole/AP