THE VOICE OF MODESTO

Do Fries Go With That Shake? Does Ammonia Go With That Burger? Do Your Kids Eat Ground Beef at School?

We should all be comforted to know that AMMONIA is now, and has been for the last eight years, injected into ground beef products containing fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil by a company out of South Dakota named Beef Products Inc.

A study, commissioned by Beef Products Inc. itself, said that the process would kill E. Coli and salmonella.

The US Dept. of Agriculture endorsed the treatment, saying the treatment destroyed E. Coli “to an undetectable level”. As of 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

Burger King, McDonald’s and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment.

Top USDA officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.

The Beef Products case reveals a schism between the main Department of Agriculture and its division that oversees the school lunch program, a divide that underscores the government’s faltering effort to make hamburger safe. The U.S.D.A. banned the sale of meat found to be contaminated with the O157:H7 strain of E. coli 15 years ago, after a deadly outbreak was traced to Jack in the Box restaurants. Meat tainted with salmonella is also a hazard. But while the school lunch program will not buy meat contaminated with salmonella, the agriculture department does not ban its sale to the general public.

E. coli outbreaks nationwide have increased in recent years. And this summer, two outbreaks of particularly virulent strains of salmonella in hamburger prompted large recalls of ground beef across several states.

The founder and owner of Beef Products, Eldon N. Roth, declined requests for interviews or access to the company’s production facilities.

The company says its processed beef, a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips, is used in a majority of the hamburger sold nationwide. But it has remained little known outside industry and government circles. Federal officials agreed to the company’s request that the ammonia be classified as a processing agent and not an ingredient that would be listed on labels.

The U.S.D.A. accepted the company’s own study on the treated beef as evidence that the treatment was effective.

School lunch officials said that in some years Beef Products testing results were worse than many of the program’s two dozen other suppliers, which use traditional meat processing methods.

Despite some misgivings, school lunch officials say they use Beef Products because its price is substantially lower than ordinary meat trimmings, saving about $1 million a year.

In the preceding year and a half, Cargill, which used more than 50 vendors, suspended three facilities for excessive salmonella; two were Beef Products plants, records show.

Pathogens died when enough ammonia was used to raise the alkalinity of the beef to a high level, company research found. But samples of the processed be early on, school lunch officials and other customers complained about the taste and smell of the beef. Samples of the beef obtained by The Times revealed lower levels of alkalinity, suggesting less ammonia was used.

Beef Products acknowledged lowering the alkalinity, and the U.S.D.A. said it had determined that “at least some of B.P.I.’s product was no longer receiving the full lethality treatment.

The Food and Drug Administration signed off on the use of ammonia, concluding it was safe when used as a processing agent in foods. This year, a top official with the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said, it eliminates E. coli to the same degree as if you cooked the product.

Carl S. Custer, a former U.S.D.A. microbiologist, said he and other scientists were concerned that the department had approved the treated beef for sale without obtaining independent validation of the potential safety risk. Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.

Officials cited complaints about the odor, and wrote in a 2002 memorandum that they had to determine if the addition of ammonia to the product is in the best interest to A.M.S. from a quality standpoint.

As sales took off, Mr. Roth started offering a buy-back guarantee: If any of the most virulent E. coli was found in ground beef containing Beef Products meat, the company would buy the tainted meat.

This was based on Mr. Roth’s initial prediction that his treated beef could kill E. coli in any meat it was mixed with. The company acknowledges that its subsequent study found no evidence to back that up, although it says it is now trying with an enhanced treatment. The guarantee remains on the company Web site: Contact a B.P.I. sales representative today to take the challenge!

In early 2003, officials in Georgia returned nearly 7,000 pounds to Beef Products after cooks who were making meatloaf for state prisoners detected a very strong odor of ammonia in 60-pound blocks of the trimmings, state records show.

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.

Unaware that the meat was treated with ammonia since it was not on the label. Georgia officials assumed it was accidentally contaminated and alerted the agriculture department. In their complaint, the officials noted that the level of ammonia in the beef was similar to levels found in contamination incidents involving chicken and milk that had sickened schoolchildren.

McDonald’s, whose hamburgers have contained Beef Products meat since 2004, declined to say if it monitored it for pH. But Danya Proud, a chain spokeswoman, said, “We expect the pH level to meet the specifications that are approved by the U.S.D.A.”

At 6:36 a.m. on Aug. 10, the Beef Products plant in South Sioux City, Neb., started up its production line for the school lunch program. In 60 minutes, the plant produced a batch of 26,880 pounds of processed beef that tested positive for E. coli.

Six days later at the same plant, another 26,880-pound lot was found to have salmonella, government records and interviews show.

Within hours of confirming the contamination, the school lunch division of the Agriculture Department in Washington began investigating.

It should be noted that Beef Products Inc. is not the only purveyor that Cargill has suspended receipt of product from, and that the emphasis is mine.

Apologies for the length of the article. Believe it or not, this is a condensed version. The fact is, we are literally poisoning ourselves with food products that are  believed to have passed the stringent standards that the US is so famous for, based on internal studies.

Anyone for a quarter pounder with ammonia?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=1&hpw