What if It Weren’t Called Pink Slime?

The irony and the absurdity are that consumer experts say L.F.T.B. is safe, nutritious and relatively inexpensive. When mixed into ground beef, it lowers the average fat content of a hamburger. And Beef Products Inc., after early production problems, is considered an industry leader in promoting safety — including for its process that uses a small amount of ammonia to kill off pathogens.

In March, at the controversy’s peak, the Consumer Federation of America, a coalition of nonprofit groups, and the National Consumers League, a nonprofit group that advocates for safe food, both issued statements defending the company and its product.

So what brought down Beef Products Inc. and pink slime? Partly it was the power of negative branding. Partly it was the power of the media. Beneath it all, this episode reflects a deepening anxiety among Americans about the food they eat and how well the government and the food industries are protecting them.

The downward spiral started a year ago, when Jamie Oliver, the British celebrity chef and host of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” on ABC, did a segment on L.F.T.B. He poured copious amounts of ammonia and water on beef trimmings and asked appalled mothers and children if they really wanted to eat it. None did. A clip of the show attracted some 1.5 million views on YouTube, and some fast-food chains stopped using the product last year.

This March Bettina Siegel, a Houston blogger who writes about the school lunch program, posted an online petition demanding that the Agriculture Department stop using the ingredient in schools. It quickly gathered 250,000 signatures and the department said it would allow schools to choose next fall whether or not to use burgers containing L.F.T.B.

Also in March, ABC’s evening news program ran what the anchor, Diane Sawyer, called “a startling ABC News investigation” revealing that much of the ground beef sold in supermarkets contains what a former Agriculture Department scientist called “pink slime.” ABC correctly reported that ground beef with the product carried no label because the Agriculture Department considered it meat like the rest of a hamburger. The network followed up with reports identifying some of the supermarket chains that were selling hamburger with the component and then reported the growing numbers that had decided to stop doing so.

At first consideration, lean finely textured beef is admittedly not all that appetizing. It is derived from the fatty scraps that remain after steaks and roasts are carved out of a beef carcass. The fat is spun off and any pathogens in the remnant are killed off with that small amount of ammonia. But the truth is this product does not differ greatly from the rest of ground beef, which is also mostly scraps and remnants.

As for how it tastes, we conducted a test at the Times cafeteria and in my home kitchen of ground beef patties, some in which pink slime made up 15 percent and others without it. Four of our testers, including me, preferred the burgers with pink slime. I found it more tender. Three others preferred the burgers without. No one found any of the burgers slimy.

As for that term “pink slime,” it was coined in 2002 in an internal e-mail by the scientist at the Agriculture Department who felt it was not really ground beef. The term was first publicly reported in The Times in late 2009, in one of the Pulitzer-prize-winning articles by Michael Moss about safety problems across the beef industry. Mr. Moss described how B.P.I. struggled to find the right amount of ammonia — enough to kill pathogens without leaving a strong odor. In some cases, the process failed to kill salmonella or E. coli, but the contaminated product was caught before it reached consumers.

In recent years, the company has had an exemplary safety record. The Agriculture Department’s school lunch program has used private laboratories to test almost 7,000 samples of the pink slime component since Jan. 1, 2010, and none have tested positive for either E. coli or salmonella. B.P.I. says its lean beef has never been associated with a food-borne illness; the Agriculture Department has never tracked a food-poisoning outbreak back to the company.

B.P.I. will continue producing its lean beef on a reduced basis and says it hopes to restore public confidence. Some meat processors have requested regulatory permission to label products containing the ingredient. We believe consumers should be fully informed, although B.P.I. will have to do a lot better at public relations to get consumers to stop thinking of the ingredient as anything but pink slime.

As unfair as this episode has been, industry and government should take it as a warning. Americans need to know more about the food they eat, and the efforts being taken to ensure that it is safe. 

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