Ammonia in your Burgers!

[Aaron]

Window cleaning chemical injected into fast food hamburger meat


(NaturalNews) If you're in the beef business, what do you do with all the extra cow parts and trimmings that have traditionally been sold off for use in pet food? You scrape them together into a pink mass, inject them with a chemical to kill the e.coli, and sell them to fast food restaurants to make into hamburgers.

That's what's been happening all across the USA with beef sold to McDonald's, Burger King, school lunches and other fast food restaurants, according to a New York Times article. The beef is injected with ammonia, a chemical commonly used in glass cleaning and window cleaning products.

This is all fine with the USDA, which endorses the procedure as a way to make the hamburger beef "safe" enough to eat. Ammonia kills e.coli, you see, and the USDA doesn't seem to be concerned with the fact that people are eating ammonia in their hamburgers.

This ammonia-injected beef comes from a company called Beef Products, Inc. As NYT reports, the federal school lunch program used a whopping 5.5 million pounds of ammonia-injected beef trimmings from this company in 2008. This company reportedly developed the idea of using ammonia to sterilize beef before selling it for human consumption.

whole story here:
Window cleaning chemical injected into fast food hamburger meat

[wantfreeenergy]

I watched a movie from netflix at my brothers' place while in ca this past week. It said the same thing. If I recall correctly they stated that they used the guts and washed them with ammonia. They said that they controlled something like 80% of the market and will soon control the rest. But when they said that it made it sound like all meat already had this done to it and they were just trying to knock out the other companies that did the same. So from my interpretation of watching that movie, it sounded like all hamburger is full of ammonia washed bits.

It's a good documentry movie worth watching. The movie was called "Food Inc."

[Aaron]

ammonia in beef

I just got Food inc but haven't had time to watch it yet.

Another movie about Monsanto, The World According to Monsanto
free online: Controlling Our Food

I got an email about this Ammonia thing by a few people
on the same day.

Hopefully it just applies to mass produced beef products and not the
locally owned or natural beef raised free range, etc...

[serenac]

Hi. Sometimes when I'm eating out I notice very clearly the smell of ammonia wafting out of the food. I don't remember what food though, I never eat hamburgers, I hate beef. But sometimes I am with other people who do eat hamburgers. I always thought, this doesn't make sense, ammonia in the FOOD??! But the odour was unmistakable. I guess this is the explanation.

Okay so maybe the documentary was about food in the States, but I remember when I was little people told me they put ammonia in the food in Canada too sometimes cause they said it made fried food crispier, so I suppose maybe it's a common practice all over the world.

[Athena]

Hopefully it just applies to mass produced beef products and not the
locally owned or natural beef raised free range, etc...

I hope it doesn't apply to the grass-finished beef either. I wouldn't think that it would, but I will ask one of the farmers from which I have bought beef.

There is a difference from beef initially raised on pasture, then finished on grain. A person needs to be sure to ask if the beef was grass-finished because even if the cow was on grass at any time in its life, then it could be said that it was raised on pasture even if it was finished in a confinement feedlot.

I buy meat & poultry straight from the farmers and I raise my own flock of chickens for eggs. Hopefully, everyone that reads this will seek out ethical farmers and buy the healthiest (and delicious!) they can buy.

For a directory of pasture-based farms and to read about the numerous benefits, please go to Eat Wild. I hope everyone here will support will support these farms.