The Obama administration has had it's positive moments for food safety, but between sending the USDA Undersecretary to a Pink Slime/GOP photo op and now only allowing voluntary labeling of Pink Slime, I have to wonder. Shouldn't consumers have the right to know if the food they are purchasing is Pink Slime? Let the Republican Pink Slime businesses invest their own money in marketing the product and winning over consumers if it's such a great product, but let consumers know what they are purchasing.
Forget about "allowing" and make this mandatory.
As consumers clamor for more transparency about the beef product dubbed “pink slime,” federal agriculture officials have agreed to allow several meat producers to list the stuff on package labels.
That means grocery shoppers soon could know whether some packages of ground beef contain the ammonia-treated meat that has been at the heart of a controversy that has shuttered plants, scuttled jobs and sparked uproar over the contents of the nation’s hamburgers.
Dirk Fillpot, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food safety branch, said Tuesday he could not identify the firms that sought labeling changes, or even say how many were involved. He only confirmed that the agency has received voluntary requests from beef firms to change their labels to indicate it contains lean finely textured beef, or LFTB.
