Last month, several grocery store chains agreed to pull the now infamous "pink slime" from their shelves. McDonald's also agreed to stop making their "burgers" with the ammonia-laden product as well as other fast food chains. For those who don't know, Pink Slime is ground beef containing what the meat industry calls "lean, finely textured beef." The low-cost filler is made from fatty meat scraps that are heated to remove most of the fat, then treated with ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella. Yum! And hopefully they will never be able to add it back in considering the company manufacturing the stuff, Beef Products Inc., is closing three of its four factories.
Campbell's Food also agreed to remove BPA (a hormone-disruptor) from the lining of their cans. I'm not sure what they are replacing it with, but it doesn't matter to me, I still won't buy their sodium-laden soups. I prefer the real thing!
Now General Mills has reformulated its Yoplait Trix yogurt to remove artificial colors, artificial flavors and high fructose corn syrup. It's a step in the right direction, but the product is still loaded with sugar, which is the contributing factor to 1/3 of children in the US being overweight. I just saw an ad in a magazine for All-Natural CoffeeMate Creamer. I don't know what's in this newer version, but the regular stuff is basically poison in a bottle. More and more companies are hearing our voices and seeing our choices in the form of reduced sales!! We are hitting them where it hurts and this makes me very happy. It's something I have been fighting for the past two years, since beginning this food journey. If our food is healthier, then we don't have to become expert label readers and scientists just to understand what's in our food.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of work to be done. We still need to remove genetically-modified organisms, artificial colors and dyes (like the rest of Europe), MSG and chemical preservatives. We are working on removing trans-fats, but they still linger in the form of partially-hydrogenated oils.
We need to remove pthalates' and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals’ ubiquity in kids’ products like plastic toys and snack food packaging. If pink slime teaches us anything, it’s that Big Ag and its industrial food cronies don’t stand a chance against consumers wielding their forks—and their wallets—for good. Vote with your wallet!
