According to today's New York Times, the "majority of hamburger" in burgers sold by McDonald's, Burger King, other fast food outlets, as well as conventional ground meat sold through grocery chains & provided in kid's school lunches in the US, now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings, once relegated to pet food & cooking oil, "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."

This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat & then treated with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage", before being turned into "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips".

During the bushit Presidency, the US Drug & Food Administration allowed meat industry "innovators" to get away with listing ammonia as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also approved the processing method & later exempted the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general public - strictly based on claims of safety & not backed by any independent testing.

Because the ammonia taste was so bad ("it was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia," said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. "I've never seen anything like it.") less alkaline ammonia treatment was introduced & now we know - thanks to testing done for the school lunch program - that the nasty stuff isn't even reliably killing the pathogens.

But government & industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E.coli & salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in ground beef products, challenging claims by the meat processing industry & the Food & Drug Administration about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E.coli has been found 3 times & salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

In July, school lunch officials temporarily banned their hamburger makers from using meat from one facility in Kansas because of salmonella - the third suspension in three years, records show. Yet the facility remained approved by the Food & Drug Administration for other customers.

Presented by The Times with the school lunch test results, top department officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.

The quote from Drug & Food Administration microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, who called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues, says it all: "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef & I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labelling."

Couldn't happen here .....