Has your burger been slimed?

Pink Slime.

Sounds like a punk-rock band to me, but apparently, it is something humans eat all the time even though they often don’t know they are eating it.

If you haven’t heard about this ground beef additive, which has been in the news lately, here is how Wikipedia defines it: “an industrial product created from beef trimmings using particular processes; these products are occasionally referred to using the neologism pink slime. These processes, which include meat trimmings passing through a centrifuge, and (in the most common process) being exposed to ammonia gas.”

Mmmm. I’d like my cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, relish and pink slime.

And people say dogs will eat anything.

I’ll take a slice of day-old pizza on the sidewalk over beef trimmings garnished with ammonia any day of the week.

Federal regulators have assured everybody that the ground beef filler is perfectly safe, and in fact, lunchrooms across the country have been serving it regularly. And one report found that 70 percent of the nation’s beef supply contains pink slime.

But a recent report by ABC News has shined an unflattering spotlight on pink slime, and people don’t like what they see. Now, big supermarket chains such as Safeway, Shaw’s and Kroger are pulling any products with pink slime, which they call “finely textured beef,” and many school districts are following suit.

It’s not just hamburger patties that contain the slime; meatballs and taco toppings are often slimed as well. From what I can tell, if you want to go slime free, you might have to go beef free until all the products containing the slime are sorted out and identified.

In the meantime, feel free to send your unwanted beef to me, in care of The Day, purely for research purposes, of course.