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Pink Slime For School Lunch: Government Buying 7 Million Pounds Of Ammonia-Treated Meat For Meals
Pink slime -- that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade -- may have been rejected by fast food joints like McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King, but is being brought in by the tons for the nation's school lunch program.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is purchasing 7 million pounds of the "slime" for school lunches, The Daily reports. Officially termed "Lean Beef Trimmings," the product is a ground-up combination of beef scraps, cow connective tissues and other beef trimmings that are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. coli. It's then blended into traditional meat products like ground beef and hamburger patties.
"We originally called it soylent pink," microbiologist Carl Custer, who worked at the Food Safety Inspection Service for 35 years, told The Daily. "We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."
Custer and microbiologist Gerald Zernstein concluded in a study that the trimmings are a "high risk product," but Zernstein tells The Daily that "scientists in D.C. were pressured to approve this stuff with minimal safety approval" under President George H.W. Bush's administration. The USDA asserts that its ground beef purchases "meet the highest standard for food safety."
Full Story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pink-slime-for-school-lun_n_1322325.html?ref=mostpopularPink slime -- that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade -- may have... more-
- Radical_Centrist
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- 3 months ago
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Let's not feed our kids food that even Taco Bell has banned!!! Petition
Our government is in the process of purchasing 7 million pounds of meat that has been treated with ammonia. They are buying it so that they can serve it to our kids at school. This type of meat has been banned by fast food restaurants but for whatever reason the government thinks it's a great idea to serve it to our children for lunch.
I have created a petition at the WhiteHouse.gov website and I need 25000 signatures to get it considered. The sooner we get the petition filled, the better chance we have of stopping this horrible crap from reaching the mouth's of the kids in our country.
The internet community put a stop to SOPA, don't we owe the same to the school children of our country?
Here's the link - PLEASE pass it on!!!
http://wh.gov/X7t
Link to story with more info about the "pink slime" below:
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/pink-slime-school-lunchOur government is in the process of purchasing 7 million pounds of meat that has been... more-
- inspirationseeker
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- 3 months ago
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- 2 comments
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Dropping Out of School Lunches
An Arizona state senator is sponsoring a bill to allow public schools to opt out of the federal school lunch program.
As reported in AZCentral. com:
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“A bill introduced by Sen. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa, would allow schools to drop out of the National School Lunch Program.
The federal program gives public schools money and food and requires them to serve nutritionally balanced meals. Children whose families fall below certain income thresholds qualify for free lunch or lunch at a reduced price.
Arizona has a state law that requires K-8 district schools to participate in the program, although high schools and charter schools are exempt.
Crandall said the idea behind the legislation, Senate Bill 1061, is to make sure all schools are treated the same.”
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The article also stated that Crandall’s motivation behind this bill was based on a worry that new federal lunch requirements will hurt schools financially.
When asked about how poor kids would fare under this bill, Senator Crandall pointed out that children who attend schools that scrap the school lunch program may have to change schools if they need free lunches.
While we may feel some sympathy that actually serving healthy food to kids may cost a bit more for Arizona’s already cash strapped schools, the idea of passing legislation to allow for the elimination of those meals altogether is a prime example of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It has also been revealed that Senator Crandall is the president of a company that oversees USDA child-nutrition programs on behalf of state agencies but he has stated, “If I were looking for a benefit, I would never run a bill to allow people to opt out of the school lunch program.”
So In case you are as baffled as I was as to why a senator with obvious ties to school lunches appears to be trying to eliminate them, let me explain.
It all goes back to the new government regulations that are being mandated to make school lunches healthier, including serving fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products. Along with this requirement, there is a six cent increase per lunch allocated to cover the additional costs of the lunches. Obviously Crandall isn’t pleased with this amount and it can only be surmised that his goal is to eliminate the federal school lunch programs in the state, which opens the door for lunch providers to go in as a cheaper alternative to serve less healthy foods to kids.
After all, who needs fruits and veggies when Tater Tots and corn dogs will do?
But of course schools could also choose to opt out of any kind of free lunches altogether as this bill is presently written, though the head of the largest teachers’ union in the state wants language inserted that will require free lunches to be served to qualifying students in public schools that opt out of the National School Lunch Program—with the local taxpayer instead of the federal government picking up the tab.
This bill’s irony is further emphasized by the fact that Arizona is in the top five states where children are going hungry. According to an important new study by Feeding America and reported by ABC News, childhood hunger is a stunning reality in the US with over 17 million, or one in four children currently suffering from food insecurity. Food insecurity is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as lack of food availability in sufficient quantities on a consistent basis, lack of access to food for a nutritious diet, and lack of appropriate knowledge of basic nutrition and care.
With the proposed federal budget cuts to other food aid programs like WIC, millions of our children are simply going without food during their important developmental years. With younger children affected by a slowing in cognitive development and older kids unable to concentrate on their work, childhood hunger leads to poor academic outcomes. In other words, dropping out of a school lunch program has a very real potential to increase the dropout rate in schools.
On the other side of the food insecurity equation is the fact that many kids are not eating good foods. Food deserts, defined as “A community in which residents must travel at least a mile to buy fresh meat, dairy products, and vegetables,” exist in most cities and rural areas. There are a whopping 23.5 million Americans living in food deserts who can only obtain and afford foods that are loaded with fat, sugar and highly processed ingredients. Whether food deserts or just poor food choices are at fault, childhood obesity is rampant and many formerly adult diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol are now afflicting young people in epidemic proportions. This carries enormous costs both to a child’s quality of life and to our healthcare system.
So any way you look at this, whether from a viewpoint of healthy lunches, unhealthy lunches or no lunches at all, this bill has all the makings of a cynical attempt on the part of one politician to maintain a status quo in poor nutritional choices for schoolchildren or– even worse– no food choice at all. Furthermore, claims by Senator Crandall that kids who need free school lunches should simply seek out schools that provide them ominously smacks of school segregation based on economic need.
An obvious solution to higher costs of school lunches is to simply apply a fraction of the $600 million budget surplus that Governor Brewer has recently bragged about towards providing free nutritionally balanced lunches to all low-income children in public schools.
But somehow I don’t think that idea is going to fly in Arizona’s republican-held legislature.An Arizona state senator is sponsoring a bill to allow public schools to opt out of... more-
- WakeUpPeople
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- 4 months ago
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Chicago Public School Bans Brown Bag Lunch
Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.
"Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?" the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.
Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: "We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!"
Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: "Do you see the situation?"
At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago's West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.
Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.
"Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," Carmona said. "It's about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception."
Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring "bottles of soda and flaming hot chips" on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.
A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said she could not say how many schools prohibit packed lunches and that decision is left to the judgment of the principals.
"While there is no formal policy, principals use common sense judgment based on their individual school environments," Monique Bond wrote in an email. "In this case, this principal is encouraging the healthier choices and attempting to make an impact that extends beyond the classroom."
Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district's food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.
At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.
"Some of the kids don't like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast," said Little Village parent Erica Martinez. "So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something."
"(My grandson) is really picky about what he eats," said Anna Torrez, who was picking up the boy from school. "I think they should be able to bring their lunch. Other schools let them. But at this school, they don't."
But parent Miguel Medina said he thinks the "no home lunch policy" is a good one. "The school food is very healthy," he said, "and when they bring the food from home, there is no control over the food."
At Claremont Academy Elementary School on the South Side, officials allow packed lunches but confiscate any snacks loaded with sugar or salt. (They often are returned after school.) Principal Rebecca Stinson said that though students may not like it, she has yet to hear a parent complain.
"The kids may have money or earn money and (buy junk food) without their parents' knowledge," Stinson said, adding that most parents expect that the school will look out for their children.
Such discussions over school lunches and healthy eating echo a larger national debate about the role government should play in individual food choices.
"This is such a fundamental infringement on parental responsibility," said J. Justin Wilson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, which is partially funded by the food industry.
"Would the school balk if the parent wanted to prepare a healthier meal?" Wilson said. "This is the perfect illustration of how the government's one-size-fits-all mandate on nutrition fails time and time again. Some parents may want to pack a gluten-free meal for a child, and others may have no problem with a child enjoying soda."
For many CPS parents, the idea of forbidding home-packed lunches would be unthinkable. If their children do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals, such a policy would require them to pay $2.25 a day for food they don't necessarily like.
"We don't spend anywhere close to that on my son's daily intake of a sandwich (lovingly cut into the shape of a Star Wars ship), Goldfish crackers and milk," education policy professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach wrote in an email. Her son attends Nettelhorst Elementary School in Lakeview. "Not only would mandatory school lunches worsen the dietary quality of most kids' lunches at Nettelhorst, but it would also cost more out of pocket to most parents! There is no chance the parents would stand for that."
Many Little Village students claim that, given the opportunity, they would make sound choices.
"They're afraid that we'll all bring in greasy food instead of healthy food and it won't be as good as what they give us at school," said student Yesenia Gutierrez. "It's really lame. If we could bring in our own lunches, everyone knows what they'd bring. For example, the vegetarians could bring in their own veggie food."
"I would bring a sandwich or a Subway and maybe a juice," said seventh-grader Ashley Valdez.
Second-grader Gerardo Ramos said, "I would bring a banana, orange and some grapes."
"I would bring a juice and like a sandwich," said fourth-grader Eric Sanchez.
"Sometimes I would bring the healthy stuff," second-grader Julian Ruiz said, "but sometimes I would bring Lunchables."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-school-lunch-restrictions-041120110410,0,2614451,full.storyFernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent... more-
- bundlebear
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- 1 year ago
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Obama signs child nutrition bill
President Barack Obama signed a sweeping overhaul of child nutrition standards Monday, enacting a law meant to encourage better eating habits in part by giving the federal government more authority to set standards for food sold in vending machines and elsewhere on school grounds.
Among other things, the $4.5 billion measure provides more money to poor areas to subsidize free meals and requires schools to abide by health guidelines drafted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To help offset the higher cost of including more fruits and vegetables, the bill increases the reimbursement rate for school lunches.
The bill is about "giving our kids the healthy futures they deserve," the president said during a bill signing ceremony at a Washington elementary school. "Right now across the country too many kids don't have access to school meals."
Even when they do, he added, too often the meals aren't sufficiently nutritious. As a result, he said, one out of every three children in America is overweight or obese.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/13/child.nutrition/
This is great, GMO veggies for all you lil tykes. Check out the story on Discovery Health where a guy lives on McDonald's for 30 days and gains almost 30 pounds. And school lunches are why children are obese. Within the story it also investigates the school lunch program by the USDA and what they give to the schools to feed the children. And it's all heat-n-eat. The film was called "Super size me"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/President Barack Obama signed a sweeping overhaul of child nutrition standards Monday,... more-
- riverratt50
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- 1 year ago
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Top Ten Tips for Packing School Lunch
Now that school is back in session, check out the top ten tips for packing school lunches!-
- GreatMom00
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- 1 year ago
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Weekly Pulse: Sharron Angle Mocks Insurance for Autism; The Fight to Save Food Stamps
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
The woman gunning for Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) job doesn’t believe that autism exists.
Yes, you heard right. Sharron Angle believes that the neurodevelopmental disorder know to medical science as “autism” is actually a government-backed hoax to redistribute wealth from hardworking health insurers to pesky kids and their greedy parents.
Angle was caught on tape promising to abolish mandatory insurance coverage for autism. “Everything that they want to throw at us is covered under ‘autism’,” Angle told the American Association of Underwriters this summer, tracing scare quotes with her fingers as she said “autism.”
Care2’s Kristina Chew, the mother of a 13-year-old boy with autism, responds to Angle’s airy dismissal:
…By saying that you don’t think there should be health care for autism, I take it that you don’t think that children, and individuals, with disabilities are in need of such things—living with their families and in their communities, healthy and safe, being loved and cared for? Being treated as we would all like to be?
The fact that Angle opposes mandated coverage for private insurers should concern voters, especially since she wants to privatize all government health care programs. In other words, Angle wants to turn health care over to the private sector and stamp out public competition. And yet, Angle’s campaign admits that the candidate and her husband receive both government health care and a Civil Service pension, according to Eric Kleefeld of TPM. If Angle is so morally opposed to government health care, she should set an example by declining the coverage.
Andy Kroll of Mother Jones has more on Angle’s record: She once told impregnated rape victims to buck up and make “lemons out of lemonade” by bearing their attacker’s child. Angle also denounced people on unemployment insurance as “spoiled.”
Food vs. health care
It may soon get even harder for poor families to make ends meet. The Senate is poised to slash the extra food stamp benefits in the stimulus before they expire. The Senate already raided $6.7 billion from the the so-called “food stamp cookie jar” to bail out Medicaid and save teachers’ jobs at the state level. Now they want to take even more money to fund the child nutrition bill.
The cuts would fund a marginal improvement in school lunches, notes Monica Potts of TAPPED. That’s all well and good, but why provide slightly better weekday lunches if the poorest children get less at every other meal?
Annie Lowery of the Washington Independent interviews anti-hunger activist Joel Berg about the cuts. Berg says that if the cuts go through, families will have to make do with considerably less than the current $4.50 per person per day. He notes that Congress wants to cut food stamp benefits in the face of rising food prices.
When families make do with less, healthy foods like fruits and vegetables will be the first casualty. Berg argues that it is economically short-sighted to prematurely terminate one of the most efficient economic stimuli in the entire stimulus package:
And we know that we aren’t only feeding people. We come at this from a moral position, a nutritional position, and an economic recovery position. This cut is so insane from an economic position as well — we know food stamps are the most effect form of stimulus. The jury is still out on parts of the stimulus — but the jury isn’t out on food stamps. It was a 1,000 percent, beyond home run grand slam success, if you’ll excuse me mixing metaphors. The money went to people who needed it, rapidly, and without a lot of bureaucracy.
In the Progressive, Ruth Conniff has a personal take on the politics of improving school lunches. Her kids’ school got a USDA Fresh Fruits and Vegetables grant to introduce more local produce into school meals.
“Bridalplasty”
The laws of Reality TV: 1) The most important thing in life is to be very beautiful so that a man will want to marry you; 2) You have until your wedding day to make yourself look like someone else.
The E! network is launching a new reality show in which brides-to-be receive free cosmetic surgery to make them look acceptable for their Special Day, as Stephanie Hallett reports at Ms. blog. Hallett notes that armchair psychiatrists are already diagnosing the contestants with Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a condition that causes sufferers to become obsessed with imagined physical imperfections.
Hallett also argues that competitive plastic surgery shows like Bridalplasty and The Swan are dramatic exaggerations. Labeling the contestants as “sick” or “crazy” implies that they are limited-edition freaks, not individuals on the extreme end of a continuum of self-loathing that affects most women.
Ectopic pregnancy
Anti-choicers have already attacked hormonal birth control as crypto-abortion. Their next target may be lifesaving surgery for a deadly complication of pregnancy. At RH Reality Check, Lon Newman writes about a young woman that survived a life threatening ectopic pregnancy.
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg takes root outside the uterus, nearly always in a fallopian tube. Tubal pregnancies are among the deadliest gynecological emergencies because the woman can rapidly bleed to death if the tube ruptures. Obviously, once a fertilized egg takes root outside the uterus, there is no chance that it will survive. However, some anti-choice extremists still maintain that treating ectopic pregnancies is a kind of abortion.
One of the ectopic pregnancy survivor’s friends actually told her that she should have respected “God’s will” and refused lifesaving surgery. “I have had friends who said that I should have ‘gone with God’s will,’ imposing their beliefs on my will to live,” the woman said.
Some friend.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger The woman gunning for Sen. Harry... more-
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Limbaugh’s solution to childhood hunger: Kids should ‘dumpster dive’ : Veterans Today
By Raw Story
Rush Limbaugh believes he knows why 16 million American schoolchildren will go hungry this summer, and it has nothing to do with soaring job losses or endemic poverty — the problem is kids can’t find their refrigerator or the local neighborhood McDonald’s.
Responding to an article Wednesday at AOL.com that reports 16 million children will go hungry this summer once free or subsidized school lunches are no longer available, Limbaugh suggested he would run a daily feature on his radio show all summer entitled “Where to find food.”
And, of course, the first will be: “Try your house.” It’s a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what’s called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you’re going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don’t want, but it will be there. If that doesn’t work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald’s….
There’s another place if none of these options work to find food; there’s always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.
Limbaugh suggested that the problem of childhood hunger is an artificial creation from people who believe that “rotten” parents “let their kids go hungry.”
“God, this is just — we can’t escape these people,” Limbaugh said, referring evidently to the author of the AOL article. “We just can’t escape them. They live in the utter deniability of basic human nature. They actually have it in their heads somehow that parents are so rotten that they will let their kids go hungry and starve, unless the schools take care of it.”
The following audio was broadcast on The Rush Limbaugh Show, June 16, 2010, and uploaded to the Web by MediaMatters.By Raw Story Rush Limbaugh believes he knows why 16 million American schoolchildren... more-
- Monkey_Films
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- 1 year ago
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USDA to offer members of Congress a taste of school lunches
Chicken fajita strips, sliced ham and canned green beans: That's what's for lunch one day next week for some lawmakers and congressional staffers, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The menu offers the same products, known as commodity foods, that the agency provides every day to public schools across the nation.
The goal of next week's tasting is to show lawmakers the improvements the department has made in the nutritional quality -- and taste -- of the $1.2 billion in school commodity foods and to win support to fund further improvements. With one-third of American children overweight or obese, the USDA has been working to cut salt and fat and provide more fruits and vegetables.Chicken fajita strips, sliced ham and canned green beans: That's what's for... more-
- ajrmy
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- 2 years ago
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Back to School Healthy Living Tips
Wellness and Lifestyle Expert, Terra Wellington, shares mom-to-mom tips on keep a healthy family and a healthy planet this back to school season. Video from California Raisins, Brita and Green Works.Wellness and Lifestyle Expert, Terra Wellington, shares mom-to-mom tips on keep a... more-
- YourUpdateTV
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- 2 years ago
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You Are What You Grow
The real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (AKA Liquid Corn) declined by 23 percent.
The Farm Bill essentially treats our children as a human disposal for all the unhealthful calories that the Farm Bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.
The public health community has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the Farm Bill.The real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40... more-
- covelogibbs
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- 3 years ago
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Never talk about vegetable diet in front of kids, teacher was fired for that
If you are a teacher and promove the comsuption of vegetables in your diet you risk yourself to lose your job since only junk food is king of all foods. If you are a teacher and promove the comsuption of vegetables in your diet you risk... more-
- juanzitosv
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- 3 years ago
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