Of Pink Slime & Buckyballs; The World Outside Your Door

McDonald's has issued a statement that they will no longer use "pink slime" as an ingredient in their hamburgers. Image Credit: McDonald's Corporation

Of Pink Slime & Buckyballs; The World Outside Your Door

The scariest things happen when one opens the lid of their laptop and logs on to Twitter ... one doesn't even have to venture out into the world to be confronted by attacks to ones understanding of safety and healthy standards.

Fundamentally the properties of materials can be changed by nanotechnology. We humans can arrange molecules in a way that they do not normally occur in nature. The material strength, electronic and optical properties of materials can all be altered using nanotechnology.

First off, the tale of the use of a bonding food agent and filler known as "Pink Slime" went viral this week all over the internet. This "Tweet" seen from cultural and political radio talk show host, Tammy Bruce.

Tammy Bruce @HeyTammyBruce
Gah! 70% of U.S. ground beef contains ‘pink slime’ goo.gl/IoY2o

Pink Slime - J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, defended the practice as a way to safely use what otherwise would be wasted. “BLBT (Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings) is a sustainable product because it recovers lean meat that would otherwise be wasted,” he said in a statement. Image Credit: BPI via ABC News

This excerpted and edited from The Raw Story -

Whistleblowers: 70 percent of U.S. ground beef contains ‘pink slime’
By Stephen C. Webster - Thursday, March 8, 2012 12:35 EST

Let’s hope you didn’t eat a hamburger before clicking on this story.

A former U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist has come forward with a startling tale of how a substance known as “pink slime” has been embedded in about 70 percent of ground beef sold in the U.S. — a topic ABC News investigated for a segment Wednesday night.

“Pink slime” is largely made up of connective tissue that used to be reserved only for dog foods. It was not classified as “meat” because it was largely seen as unfit for human consumption. It also contains ammonia, which is used to kill off bacteria so people who eat it do not get sick.

But in the early 90s, former undersecretary of agriculture Joann Smith decided that it was meat, allowing it to enter the human food chain. When she left her post in 1993, she immediately took a job with Beef Products, Inc. on their board of directors.

The meat industry now refers to it as “lean finely textured beef,” but in a government memo USDA scientist Gerald Zirnstein coined the term “pink slime,” which now appears to have stuck. Zirnstein and fellow former USDA scientist Carl Custer told ABC News that it has become so prolific, “pink slime” can now be found in approximately 70 percent of U.S. ground beef.

“Pink slime” was in the news last month after several major fast food chains announced they would no longer use it as filler in their hamburgers. Despite those restaurants’ plans, the U.S. government has continued to purchase “pink slime” for use in school lunches, according to a report out this week by the News Corp.-run iPad newspaper The Daily.
[Reference Here]

Danielle @danzerotti, a self-described "happily married mother of 4, tweeted "Another reason my 4 kids should be glad that I take the time to prepare their lunches at home every day. As much as I complain."

"Pink slime" is bits of meat and muscle salvaged from slaughterhouse floors that are treated with a pink chemical to kill any dangerous pathogens. According to an earlier report by msnbc.com, the unappetizing pink goo is widely used in the food industry as an anti-microbial agent in meats and as a leavening agent in bread and cake products. It's regulated by the U.S. Agriculture Department (and has been allowed for human consumption since a favorable ruling by the USDA during the Clinton Administration), which classifies it as "generally recognized as safe." Nevertheless, McDonald's, have said they are pulling the infamous "pink slime" from their hamburgers.

We do not know how many large hamburger serving food restaurant chains (McDonald's being the largest) are still using the lesser expensive slime" filler infavor of profit motive but we do know this truth tweeted in response to Tammy Bruce @HeyTammyBruce referenced earlier in this posting.

Edmund Jenks @TheEDJE
@HeyTammyBruce IN-N-OUT raises, processes, and grinds all of their own beef in a dedicated channel. This is a corporate hallmark.

Or as IN-N-OUT loves to say in its tagline ... "Freshness You Can Taste".

The other very disturbing item to flash across the twitter feed of communications on TweetDeck was this item having to do with radiation and "Buckyballs" used in medical procedures primarily to address the onslaught of Cancer.

Alexander Higgins‏ @kr3at
Highest Radiation Levels Since Fukushima Disaster Recorded in Los Angeles, CA bit.ly/zOySIW

This excerpted and edited from Alexander Higgins Blog -

Highest Radiation Levels Since Fukushima Disaster Recorded in Los Angeles, CA
Posted by Alexander Higgins - March 9, 2012 at 11:36 pm

A March 6th test of a HEPA filter recorded radiation levels 668% or 6.68 times the normal background radiation levels. This test took place 43 days after initial tests and shows a 130% increase since January 22nd.

“The California Highway Patrol considers anything over three times background, 300% of background above, a trigger level to a hazardous materials situation,” reported the EnviroReporter.

Considering that it is now documented FACT that the NRC and other US agencies worked to cover up the dangers posed to the United States from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, these independent radiation tests are absolutely paramount to get out to the American people.
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The March 6 test of the combined dust came in at a sizzling 668% of background or 6.68 times normal. Since the last testing period, the radiation detected has risen another 130% indicating a continued upward trend.

That radiation is rising in Los Angeles comes as no surprise considering the enormous amount of radioactive ‘buckeyball’ filled with 60 uranium uranyls apiece that has been being produced at the stricken complex for almost a year. A just-released U.C. Davis report describing the phenomena is also examined in Beta Watch.

We now posits that this radiation ahead of the main swell through repeated aeration resultant of choppy Pacific water in storms, is picked up and moved on the winds as sea spray and mist moving ahead of the current. No other explanation is so compelling than this mechanism of increased mobility of this radiation most likely in the form of buckyballs that may, as the U.C. Davis report suggests, the same nanoparticle model that could cage in mobile spheres plutonium-239, strontium-90, cesium-137 and the deadly host of other radionuclides from Fukushima that have poisoned the Pacific for nearly a year.
[Reference Here]

Buckyballs - Visitors' shadows manipulate and reshape projected images of "Buckyballs." "Buckyball," or a buckminsterfullerene molecule, is a closed cage-structure molecule with a carbon network. "Buckyball" was named for R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983), a scientist, philosopher and inventor, best known for creating the geodesic dome. Image Credit: © 2003 Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum

Unless one has had the medical procedure used to combat Cancer, one may not be familiar with the definition of Buckyball as excerpted and edited from PopSci.com:

Chemotherapy is notorious for the toll it takes on the entire body. It kills cancer cells, sure, but it kills a lot of healthy cells, too. But soon a new advance in carbon chemistry may replace the shotgun blast of chemo with a radiation sniper shot.

Scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University have devised a technique for placing radioactive molecules inside the soccer-ball-shaped molecules known as buckyballs. Thanks to new advances in cancer targeting, the buckyballs might be able to deliver the radioactive particles to specific cancer cells. This method would provide a targeted chemotherapy that would avoid the painful and prolonged side effects caused by today's full-body radiation treatments.

To make the buckyballs, the scientists zapped carbon rods with plasma until the the rods were reduced to ash. The scientists then took the ash and passed it through a radioactive solution. After purification, the resultant mixture contains radioactive buckyballs, and will dissolve in a biofluid.
[Reference Here]

For we, at MAXINE, all of this leads to lessons learned early in life through experiences learned in building block organizations like the Boy Scouts of America - ie: Leave a campsite cleaner than as one found it ... or as the requirements for a Backpacking Merit Badge list - Describe the importance of using Leave No Trace principles while backpacking, and at least five ways you can lessen the crew's impact on the environment.



** Article first published as Of Pink Slime & Buckyballs; The World Outside Your Door on Technorati **