Let's have mechanically separated chicken for dinner tonight.

[DaShi]

Looks to me like an abdication of responsibility all around. The parents can't (or won't) provide healthy lunches for their children and school officials (with consent of parents) feed crap in school lunches.

The only winner I see is the pink slime producer.

Schools will start providing better lunches when they see a real demand for them. Most parents don't care enough to exercise their choice as a consumer to not buy unhealthy foods for their kids.

[Dinner]

So the "new" formula will make coke FDA compliant and compliant with CA regs?

Awesome. There's nothing wrong with it now and should be perfectly acceptable for school children.

It's not the FDA but the California equivalent. The complaint is we've know those compounds are cancer causing for over a decade but the FDA has refused to take action supposedly because industry lobbyists were bribing officials not to take action via "campaign contributions". California state law requires labeling so that consumers can make informed decisions for themselves. Now, because California's market is so large even though the labeling wouldn't be required in the other 49 states the companies will be changing their formulas to comply with the stricter California standards.

BTW in California it is already illegal to sell soda and sugary snacks in schools. Believe it or not our former Republican governor championed that one.

[kentonio]

Looks to me like an abdication of responsibility all around. The parents can't (or won't) provide healthy lunches for their children and school officials (with consent of parents) feed crap in school lunches.

The only winner I see is the pink slime producer.

That was the whole points of Olivers campaign. It started in the UK and he had to fight tooth and nail to get fatty, unhealthy foods out of the lunchtime canteens. He then brought it to American and found exactly the same thing happening there. Kids were eating horrible diets at home, and then coming into school and eating horrible **** there too. The sad part is that often its literally just a case of the education system choosing the unhealthy option simply to save a couple of cents per child.

What he also found was that its often a political issue too. One of the most striking parts of the show was a feud he ended up in with a radio talk show host who spent weeks telling his listeners that the campaign was just an intrusion into peoples lives. After a while he did actually get through to that guy, and they ended up fighting on the same side, but it illustrated just how much of an up-hill battle there is to try and get decent food to kids who have been trained their entire lives to eat unhealthy, pre-processed foods that will make them obese and kill them long before their time.

[Wezil]

It's not the FDA but the California equivalent. The complaint is we've know those compounds are cancer causing for over a decade but the FDA has refused to take action supposedly because industry lobbyists were bribing officials not to take action via "campaign contributions". California state law requires labeling so that consumers can make informed decisions for themselves. Now, because California's market is so large even though the labeling wouldn't be required in the other 49 states the companies will be changing their formulas to comply with the stricter California standards.

I am aware of the issue. Btw, I did say "FDA compliant and compliant with CA regs"

BTW in California it is already illegal to sell soda and sugary snacks in schools. Believe it or not our former Republican governor championed that one.

OMG!!! What a bunch of reactionaries! Don't they know there's cyanide in almonds?!

[Dinner]

Do you mean that the school lunches are Doritos and Twinkies? That's what I mean by junk food. Mechanically separated meats treated with ammonia are economical, but they're not junk.

The "pink slime" (it's literally called that on the manufacturer's label) was illegal to sell for human consumption until the 1990's and most of it was sold as dog food or animal feed. During Gingrich's "Republican Revolution" in the 1990's they let industry lobbyists write their own regulations so now 70% of the ground beef sold in the US has at least 15% "pink slime" in it. My basic problem is this is dishonest and borderline fraud by the meat packing companies because meat generally means muscle tissue while ground up bone, tendons, and cartilage isn't meat so labeling something as beef when it has been adulterated with additives which are not beef is just fraud in my book.

[Dinner]

You'd need to drink hundreds of cans of soda a day to get cancer from the coloring. You'd die of diabetes or some **** long before the cancer ever got to you.

California

No one is saying they couldn't sell it but they would have to label it as containing a known carcinogen. The companies desperately don't want to put that on their cans so they decided to change their formula on their own. Personally, I'm all for accurate labeling so consumers can make informed choices on their own but for the market to work customers need to know what is in the things they buy. I can't understand why you'd be against great transparency.

[Felch]

I'm against it because the testing they did to show that it was carcinogenic is inconsistent with real world conditions. They're not giving mice the equivalent of five cans of soda, or even twenty. They're giving them concentrated doses that you could only get from hundreds of cans per day. Misleading the public with that sort of lousy science and fear mongering distracts people from the actual dangers of soda, like its insanely high sugar content. Put a label on soda that says it contributes to diabetes, I have no problem. Putting a label about cancer, and you're just advancing the cause of bad science.

The pink slime isn't called pink slime by the manufacturers, you dumbass. Nobody in their right mind would ever put that on their labels. It's called "lean, finely textured meat," and it's never been linked to any harm to anybody in the country. The only reason it wasn't approved until the 90s is because the ammonia gas process didn't exist until the 90s.

[giblets]

What's wrong with soda? It's only water and chemicals.

The empty calories? I don't think it's a problem if you drink a reasonable amount.

[Dinner]

Pink slime is a name which an official at the FDA used to describe the treated filler while the companies insist on calling it "lean, finely textured beef trimmings" (notice they don't call it meat) and yes trying to claim it is ground beef is factually incorrect since it's mostly stuff other than actual muscle tissue. I can eat ground bones or ground skin or even ground tendons but don't claim they're meat because they're not. BTW Costco, Publix, Whole Foods, and HEB all have policies that none of the ground beef they sell can have fillers or additives and so none of those chains sell any meat which contains pink slime.

Right now, since accurate labels are not legally required, the only way you can avoid eating the dog food quality crap filler is to shop at reputable retailers.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/business-15749628/pink-slime-outrage-beef-industry-responds-28567721.html

[Felch]

Just so you can see for yourself about how retarded California is, here's what NIH has to say about 4MI, and here's what the ***** at CSPI have to say.

From NIH:

Groups of 50 male and 50 female F344/N rats were fed diets containing 0-, 625-, 1,250-, or 2,500 ppm 4MI (males) or 0-, 1,250-, 2,500-, or 5,000 ppm 4MI (females) for 106 weeks. Based on the food consumption the calculated average daily doses were approximately 30, 55, or 115 mg 4MI/kg body weight to males and 60, 120, or 250 mg 4MI/kg to females. Survival of all exposed groups of males and females was similar to that of the control groups.

Here's what CSPI is telling us:

In one recent study, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found 4-MI at levels of 0.30 to 0.36 micrograms/milliliter (ug/ml) in representative brands of colas that we presume included the two major U.S. brands, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. A 12-ounce serving of those drinks would contain 108 to 130 ug of the contaminant.

Let's say you are 87 kilos. You would have to drink 20,000 cans of coke a day for a 106 weeks to match the dosage they were giving the 625 ppm males. There is no evidence that 4-MI is any real threat, but California is full of luddite morons who would rather be scared than do a little math.

[Dinner]

The amount of 4MI varies by bottler since they adjust the amount of natural caramel to 4MI based on local prices. ABC was saying that on the east cost 4MI levels are 3-5 times higher then on the west coast where bottlers have already reduced 4MI amounts in response to media coverage and pressure from interest groups. Yes, someone would have to drink a lot over an extended period of time to get cancer, assuming there are no more interactions with other substances people eat (which there likely is), but I continue to support proper product labeling so that consumers can make informed choices. If someone wants to completely avoid substances like 4MI then they should be able to read a label and quickly know.

[giblets]

Stupid hippies think that evil corporations are hell-bent on poisoning us and if something doesn't come from nature then it must be bad.

[Dinner]

I don't think I've said that at all (though I assume you were saying that sarcastically). All I'm saying is labels should be accurate so customers can make informed choices for themselves.

[Felch]

Even if 4MI levels are ten times higher here, I'd have to drink 2,000 cans of coke a day for years to get the same dosage as the lowest dosage group of rats. There's simply no realistic danger from the substance. The reason we don't label it is because it's not an intentional ingredient, it's a contaminant, one that exists in very small quantities and which poses no realistic danger to humans. If we put every possible contaminant on the labels, there'd be no room for anything else. And who wants to read about all the tiny bug parts that get ground up into peanut butter, or anything like that? That's not informative, it's just off-putting.

[Dinner]

The rat one only did large dosage, short time period tests. We honestly still do not know how much of an increase in cancer rates in low dosage but long period time frame would be, but, we do know it is a carcinagen. So, yes, a precautionary principle may very well be justified and labeling so consumers can decide for themselves does seem fair.