Audio By Carbonatix
When the pink slime fervor began, Beef Products Inc, the largest national producer of what it prefers to call Lean Finely Textured Beef, halted production at a few of its plants. They claimed that free-falling demand, caused by Kroger, McDonald’s and other large scale retailers’ rejection of the ammonia-treated beef, forced them to stop production.
BPI ran full page ads in national publications and said they planned on waiting till the smear campaign died down — they were hoping the negative publicity would just go away. Instead, more large-scale restaurants and grocery chains jumped on the bandwagon and shunned the processed meat paste.
Last week BPI announced it was shutting down three of its factories. Now news from other beef-processing companies points to even more permanent change. Instead of waiting for the public to forget and then spooling up the factories again, processors are looking for alternative processing methods. They’re even picking up knives again. Cargill Inc. has gone old school, hand-carving lean protein out from trimmings cut from carcasses. This is how butcher shops like Rudy’s in Deep Ellum have been doing things since they opened — it’s labor-intensive work.
The results, as predicted, are an increase in ground beef prices at retail outlets, ahead of pricing pressures caused by last year’s drought that have yet to be realized. While it’s hard to tell the effect pink slime’s demise will have on ground-beef prices on its own, it’s obvious we’re going to be paying more for our outdoor hamburger grill-out sessions over the next few years.
