Raw Milk and Pink Slime

(First published on GazetteXtra, 4-23-2010)

“Pink slime” doesn't sound very appetizing, does it?

Yet many of you reading this eat it every day when you have a hamburger.

I first heard about pink slime while listening to National Public Radio. “Pink slime” is the industry nickname for fatty slaughterhouse trimmings that at one time were not considered fit for human consumption. They were instead relegated to pet food and cooking oil.

For one thing, these trimmings were susceptible to contamination. But a few years ago, the beef industry came up with a wonderful idea. They could kill E.coli and salmonella by injecting the pink slime with ammonia. And gee, they could also make a few more pennies by salvaging this undesirable stuff. So over the last few years, more and more of the ground beef we eat – whether it's from a fast food restaurant, a grocery store or a school lunch service – has contained this ammonia-cleansed beef-like substance. Mmm, mmm, good!

I actually saw this ammonia treatment in action in a frightening documentary called “Food, Inc.” that aired on public television this week. The film is a must-see for anyone interested in knowing what really is going on with the food that we place on our table every night. Watching it gave me a new appreciation for my wife's insistence that we eat organic or locally grown as often as possible.

It also reminded me of how different things were at the dinner table when I was growing up on our farm. Much of what we ate was grown or raised.

We had no lack of red meat in the house. It was the result of a magical transformation. Whichever cow kicked Dad the most was sent away in the back of a truck, only to return to our chest freezer as a pile of white packages.

I've been asked, “Didn't you name your cows?” Trust me, my dad had a lot of names for the cows. If I printed any of them here, this blog would be gone faster than cheese puffs at Oprah's house.

At least I didn't get to see what actually happened to the cows when they went away to become dinner. Chickens were another matter.

I got to witness the entire process. First, Dad would hold the chicken down on a cement block and – boom – off went its head with a hatchet. It was a Midwestern farm version of the French Revolution. As a kid growing up with this reality, I didn't find that part of it gross. What I did find gross was when our dog Tippy would chew the severed heads.

I also learned at an early age about the saying,“running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” They really do. And it was a bizarre and comical sight to behold, especially when you're six years old.

It wasn't just meat that found its way from our farm to our table. We had a decent-sized garden, too. Mom grew everything from peas, beans and carrots to potatoes, tomatoes and sweet corn.

And of course, being dairy farmers, we drank the product we sold. It's funny that just this week the state legislature approved a bill to allow the sale of raw milk. Raw milk was what I grew up on. I even have a memory of when I was very little, my dad squeezing a cow's teat and shooting the milk directly into my mouth from a few feet away.

I'm sure the thought of drinking raw milk straight from the cow is turning a few stomachs out there. Eventually, we stopped drinking it raw and bought a home pasteurizer, a metal contraption that basically boiled the milk to a high temperature for a certain length of time. When the thing eventually broke, however, we didn't rush to replace it.

It's been a long time since I've drank whole milk – these days, I'm strictly a skim or 2% guy – and I imagine if I had the real stuff now, it would make skim taste like water by comparison. Growing up, I regularly added Hershey's Syrup and drank chocolate milk. Our milk had cream in it, and when you made chocolate milk, the cream wouldn't take on the chocolate color. So you had white stuff floating in your brown milk, which gave your drink the appearance of having dandruff. Being a finicky kid, I decided I didn't like that, so my solution was to drink the milk through a handkerchief that would filter out the cream. When that succeeded in doing little more than making a mess, I opted for a straw.

Some may argue that drinking raw milk was more dangerous than eating ammonia-cleansed near-beef. Given the choice today, I'd go with raw milk every time.

And soon, in Wisconsin, I may be able to legally buy it.