Pink slim: the term, which recently hit the news, now sends chills down our spines.
After social media helped make people aware if pink-slime, causing restaurants and supermarkets to stop using it in their beef, Beef Products Inc. stopped work at 75 percent of its plants in March. They will now be closing plants in three states, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Nearly 650 people will lose their when the plants closes on May 25 in Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kansas, and Waterloo Iowa, company spokesman Rich Jochum was quoted as saying.
Not all of the plants are closing. A South Sioux City, Nebraska plant will stay open for business, but will run with fewer jobs.
When the pink-slime is being made, it’s heated and treated with a small amount of ammonia to kill bacteria and has been used as an FDA approved filler for years.
BPI will not comment on how much business they have lost since pink-slime exploded onto social media sites, but they have said their business has taken a “substantial” hit.
“We will continue communicating the benefits of BPI’s lean beef, but that process is much more difficult than (countering) the campaign to spread misinformation that brought us to this point,” Jochum said in a statement. He had previously thought the pink-slime scare would wear off in the near future, but now knows it’s not possible.
“This is a sad day for the state of Iowa,” said Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who publicly ate pink-slime when the scare first started. “The fact that a false, misleading smear campaign can destroy a company’s reputation overnight should disturb us all.”
The pink-slime-eating governor said the BPI workers will “go home to their families and will soon be without a job, all because some media on the coasts decided to unfairly and viciously smear the product they so proudly produced.”
