In America, it's not illegal to sell disgusting cow purée washed with ammonia for human consumption. But, according to BPI, the company that makes this dystopian meat filler, it's illegal to talk about it. Time for a $1.2 billion lawsuit.
Mother Jones reports that BPI, which caught an enormous amount of (deserved!) hell for selling the grotesque quasi-protein, is "launching a $1.2 billion defamation suit against ABC News and three whistleblowers-two federal employees and a former BPI worker -who spoke to the news network." This is what you do when you want to silence your critics after they call you out for doing something gross to the poor, uninformed, beef patty-chomping American public. But unless you work at ABC, this isn't such a big deal. What is a big deal is that pink slime could be on the verge of a vile, goopy comeback.
Cargill, one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States, is a firm like BPI—they manufacture food on a massive industrial scale. They're also keen on pink slime, and according to internal focus groups, they think the US public might be too. Why? We're forgetful and generally don't care about reality: "The issue is perception, not facts or science," says a Cargill rep. Americans have extremely low attention spans. We're done freaking out about pink slime—or "finely textured beef," as the food factories call it—and have moved on to other worries, like Islam and re-runs of The Big Bang Theory:
"We found that in a month's time the issue was in consumers' rear view mirror and fading fast. When they learned how this 100% beef product is produced and why it has value to everyone from farm to fork, they were comfortable with it being included as part of their ground beef."
Cargill is now considering a re-launch of their own pink goop crap formula, meaning all the undesirable parts of the cow could be headed to your grocery store again in time for next BBQ season. Yum. [Food Navigator via Mother Jones]
Update: A BPI rep wrote in to say the original image included with this post was not, one of their products.