Anyone who pays attention to the meat markets knows what “pink slime” did to cattle and pig prices recently.
Here they are on a chart:
That’s Chicago lean hogs in red and lean cattle in green. The pink sliming occurred where you see that sudden drop-off in prices for both pork and beef at the end of March and beginning of April. It came after a few weeks of weakening prices, so it was one of those things that gives a shove to something that’s already stumbling.
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Notice how lean hogs have recovered entirely from the slide? Pink slime is used in beef, so that makes sense. In the initial selloff all the red meats got taken down, but then the markets realized pork is actually the other white meat, so they relented apparently.
Anyhoo, it’s a short-term market lesson in the touchiness of consumers to perceived food safety and quality and grossness issues. (For those of you living under a rock, the “pink slime” controversy arose after images and descriptions about what the industry amusingly calls “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB) began shooting around the internet and causing a nationwide U.S. barf-bag effect. LFTB/pink slime is a product made from the stuff on a beef carcass that isn’t good or safe enough to chuck straight into the grinder – pretty grungey stuff. It gets sprayed with ammonia to kill off any germs that might be hanging around inside it, then it gets pureed and turned into a pinkish substance that some burger manufacturers pour in to the ground beef they use. It’s safe and approved.
But gross.
And that’s the issue. It appalled and disgusted many consumers, so they bailed on beef for a bit. Some pink slime factories have shut down and at least one manufacturer has gone broke.
So what’s the lesson here? It’s rather hard to tell, if you think about it for a bit. Intially, most people would say it’s a sign that consumers expect their foods to be high quality and not containing stuff like pink slime. That certainly was the trigger here. But maybe it’s something specific to burgers.
That quality-touchiness doesn’t seem to apply to 99.8 percent of consumers when they buy hot dogs for their kids – which they know are made from things that are often of pink slime quality – or when they buy street meat from sausage vendors on street corners. Not only is the meat itself of questionable quality, but the cart is hardly antiseptic, and the filthy pavement and street around the hot dog cart – and the pigeons circling around it pooping – wouldn’t pass most Quality Assurance standards. (Full disclosure: I often eat street meat and have never gotten sick from it.) Yet the carts are almost always busy. It’s like the “voluntary suspension of disbelief” we all use when reading fiction or watching reality TV. We allow ourselves to park the bit of our brains that says “This isn’t real.” With food, we have a “voluntary suspension of crap-giving about quality and grossness” when it comes to many foods. This is the only thing that allows poutine to continue to be ordered by consumers. (Full disclosure: I very occasionally eat poutine, and always swear afterwards that “I WILL NEVER EAT THAT FILTH AGAIN!” I have never yet been right.)
Many urban gourmands relish tucking into exotic foreign food products, yet they know the products come from countries where there are virtually no food safety laws, or at least no policing of any standards that actually exist. For moments, they are willing to suspend their health and purity concerns in order to indulge a culinary delight.
So what’s the story with burgers and pink slime? If you’re feeding your kids hamburgers at all, you’re not exactly a food quality nazi. (Full disclosure: I feed my kids hamburgers.) You know it’s generally not tenderloin that’s been ground up, and there’s likely a lot of fat therein. And two days ago you probably fed hot dogs to your kids at the Saturday matinee of “The Lorax.” And popcorn fried in who-knows-what kind of saturated fat. Yet pink slime appalls.
What’s the story?
Methinks it’s this: We actually believe burgers are just nice beef ground up. We don’t think it’s tenderloin, but we also don’t think it’s tendons and ligaments and goop and guck. Everyone knows hot dogs are yucky stuff made yummy through the miracle of processing. Most people don’t think that’s the case with burgers. So when people find out that some burgers are made with something they had no clue they were eating, they get outraged, feel defrauded, and rebel.
For a week or two. Then they smell burgers cooking on their neighbor’s BBQ and run out to the store and buy a bunch of burgers.
But this time they check the ingredients, or ask the butcher (if one exists in their province or state) to make sure it’s just ground-up meat in the burger. This controversy won’t likely change beef consumption in even the medium-term, but it won’t help the long, long trend of generally falling per capita beef consumption in North America.
In the end, it’s probably an opportunity for high-quality burger manufacturers, who use just decent grinding beef, to push their products by highlighting the fact that that’s all they use. Some already do this. For everyone else, this is probably a flash-in-the-pan that means little – other than giving us the fun new phrase “pink slime” to play around with.
