Mar 8 2012

New book: Lunch Money!

I just got my copy of Kate Adamick’s Lunch Money:  Serving Healthy School Food in a Sick Economy (Cook for America, 2012).

I had seen it at an earlier stage and wrote a blurb for it:

Kate Adamick is my go-to guru for tough-minded practical advice about school food.  This book is a must read for anyone who works with school food as well as parents who care what their kids eat in school.

Kate Adamick knows more about how the school food financial system works than anyone I know.  She has figured out how to put the system to work so it produces healthy foods for kids.

Everyone I know who is involved with school food complains about lack of funds.  Kate runs workshops with school food personnel to help them access available funds that can be used to buy kitchen equipment and better foods.

Her secret?  Getting kids to eat breakfast and teaching cooks to cook.

Her book provides diagrams, charts, and worksheets to show how the system works and what to do to transform school food from something that feels like a problem into a program that makes cooks feel proud and kids happy to eat healthier food.

You don’t believe this?  Take a look.

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Just got this in the mail:

Pink slime is a beef-like product created by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally used in dog food, and treated with ammonia hydroxide to kill salmonella and E. coli.

It is “not meat” according to a 35-year veteran USDA microbiologist,1 and was recently rejected by the likes of McDonalds, Taco Bell and Burger King.2

So it’s pretty disturbing that the USDA continues feeding this stuff to kids, and plans to buy seven million pounds of it for school lunches.

Tell the USDA: Stop putting pink slime “Lean Beef Trimmings” in kids’ school lunches.

In an all too familiar story, despite concerns raised by USDA inspectors and minimal safety inspections, the USDA approval of Beef Products Incorporated’s “Lean Beef Trimmings” was pushed through by USDA undersecretary JoAnne Smith, a George H. W. Bush appointee and former president of the National Cattleman’s Association.

The USDA allows beef products like hamburgers to contain up to 15% of the ammonia-treated, meat-ish stuff, but inadequate labeling requirements prevent parents from knowing if it’s included in the meat being served at their kids’ school.

Aside from the lack of nutritional value, pink slime raises a number of health and safety concerns. The New York Times exposed in 2009 that despite being treated with ammonia, three E. coli contaminations and four dozen salmonella contaminations occurred between 2005 and 2009, during which time school lunch officials three times temporarily banned hamburger makers from using pink slime from one facility in Kansas.

Ammonium hydroxide is itself of course harmful to eat, and can potentially turn into ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in homemade explosives.

Kids need nutritious food to be able to learn in school, and many of the tens of millions of kids who rely on school lunches come from low-income families where they are less likely to get a healthy diet.

While pink slime is a nutritionally inferior and potentially risky product, the school lunch program saves only three cents more per pound of ground beef by continuing to put this filler in kids’ hamburgers.

Over the past few months, numerous fast-food chains have rejected the product and say they no longer use it. School lunch officials should clearly follow suit.

Thank you for fighting for safe food in school lunches.
Elijah Zarlin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

  • Ecological point of view
  • March 8, 2012
  • 6:16 pm

Please note that from ecological point of view discarding big part of the animal away “as non edible” is wasting natural resources. This does not meant that “lean beef trimmings” should be treated with ammonia hydroxide and fed as meat to school children.
Thank you telling about the book and the author. Sounds like must read to me.

  • Michael Bulger
  • March 9, 2012
  • 9:22 am

Ecological point of view:

I think we should note that someone who considers parts of an animal non-edible isn’t necessarily saying those parts are unusable. This “pink slime” BLBT reminds me of possibilities for composted fertilizers.

It definitely has a “yuck” factor, which may or may not be misplaced. The NYTimes wrote an article which questioned the effectiveness of the process in regards to food safety. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&th&emc=th)

Is this product best sold as uncooked ground beef? Perhaps a more marketing-friendly approach would be sending it out as precooked pet food or something similar. Proper cooking would allow the plant to save on ammonia hydroxide and also PR headaches.

Others have noted that the at least some BPI plants go above and beyond the pathogen testing that USDA requires. This should be applauded. (http://efoodalert.net/2012/03/08/whats-wrong-with-pink-slime/)

One of my cats died from toxic cat food so don’t think we are cool with feeding their Frankenstein faux food to our companion animals

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