GOW Action Project

One day while my parents were watching the news I was sitting doing my homework when I hear “Pink slime. Could it be in the beef you had for dinner tonight?” When I heard the name pink slime, it caught my attention immediately. I just thought: “How could anyone possibly put that into our food? It doesn’t seem right!” I did some research and found that the “proper” name for pink slime is lean finely textured beef (LFTB). This kind of made me laugh and think that they tried to give it a name to make it sound much better than it actually is kind of like the proper name for a garbage man is a sanitation engineer. I came to find that this pink slime is an additive to beef products which consists of ground beef scraps, fat, and connective tissue. It is treated with ammonia gas to kill bacteria, grounded up, and flash frozen for use as an additive to beef products.

For my Grapes of Wrath Action Project I decided to contact the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). At first I was going to contact the FDA because that’s what I heard in the news but after doing research I found that the USDA was in control of this product. I want to know how pink slime is USDA approved, how “healthy” it is for people to consume, and how that if it was in products that no label had to be present on the packaging. I found that Tom Vilsack is the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture for the USDA but nowhere could I find his contact information. I decided to email other parts of the USDA and hopefully work my way up to contacting him. The National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, Labeling requirements for meat committee, the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, and USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline each had a separate email to ask questions, so on Thursday April 5^th I emailed theses four different parts of the USDA to hopefully get my answers and/or be given contact information of someone higher in the company. I checked my email on Friday night to see if I had gotten any responses and I had one. The email was from the labeling requirements for meat committee. It thanked me for my concern and explained a few things but most importantly said: “When any form of lean finely textured beef is blended into ground beef it will not be labeled. Because it is 100% beef, LFTB is not singled out as a separate ingredient on ground beef packages”. I was happy to have gotten an email back so quickly because I didn’t expect one to come so fast or at all. However, I was not happy with the answer I received. I do not believe that LFTB is only beef. When I did my research it said that it contained connective tissue. The connective tissue is from the cow but that doesn’t make it beef! The next time I checked my email was the following Friday afternoon because up until then I had no internet access because I was in Florida. I had not received any other emails from any of the other contacts I had emailed. I decided to go back to the USDA’s website and search for people to contact and not committees. I emailed five people from Office of Data Integration and Food Protection asking the same thing I had asked the committees. I checked my email on Saturday night and had not heard anything back from any of them. I checked my email again today and still have not heard anything back. I am determined to find the answers to my questions.

This project connected very well with The Grapes of Wrath. I found that trying to find the person in charge and contacting them is very difficult even in our time with our advanced technology. The tenant farmers from The Grapes of Wrath did not have the technology we do today to email people and such. I became very frustrated when I did not get the answers I wanted to any at all and I know the tenant farmers felt the same way. I think that you assigned this project so that we would get frustrated (not that you wanted us to) and feel how the farmers felt. I think that only when you go through the same obstacles in life, can you truly relate to someone and empathize with them. I think this project allowed us to feel how the farmers felt and created a connection with the novel.