Schools, School Lunches | featured news

Goodbye candy bars and sports drinks. Hello baked chips and diet sodas....

“Pink slime,” or “lean, finely textured beef” filler treated with ammonia to kill bacteria, has been making the headlines recently in response to the U.S. Department of Agriculture decision to make 7 million pounds of ground beef containing “pink slime” available to school districts for use in school meals.

The controversy over the ground beef filler dubbed "pink slime" has hurt U.S. ground beef demand, a Tyson Foods executive said Tuesday. Heightened awareness and debate over the product, which the industry calls lean finely textured beef, has "put a fair amount of pressure on ground beef consumption," Tyson Chief Operating Officer Jim Lochner said during a presentation at an investor conference hosted by Morgan Stanley.

The company that makes "pink slime" is suspending operations at three of four plants where the low-cost beef filler is made amid a public outcry over concern about the ingredient.

News of the ammonia-treated additive, formally called lean finely textured beef, set off a reaction by schools and an announcement by the Agriculture Department.

All this angst over "pink slime" has made one thing clear: We don't always know what we're getting when we bite into a big juicy burger....

"Pink slime" just went from a simmer to a boil. In less than a week earlier this month, the stomach-turning epithet for ammonia-treated ground beef filler suddenly became a potent rallying cry by activists fighting to ban the product from supermarket shelves and school lunch trays.

Even as schools raise prices on meals, new guidelines under federal consideration threaten to put an added burden on an already budget-strained program.

School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.