Deflate food-purity claims before they explodeDeflate food-purity claims before they explode

Richard

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors and management of Nation’s Restaurant News.

By the time you read this, the “pink slime” witch hunt hopefully will have died down. There are a few lessons we can learn from this public relations nightmare before another one like it rears its head.


Lean beef trimmings are a perfectly safe product and, by all accounts, nutritious. Economical and environmentally friendly, trimmings allowed producers to consolidate and process scraps of beef. That so-called “pink slime” was able to save us from having to raise an additional 1.5 million head of cattle.


Despite the favorable facts, once the press sunk its teeth into “pink slime,” America got a feeding frenzy. Suppliers ...