Pink Slime For The Soul

Recognize this? Media outlets refer to it as “pink slime.”

Chances are, you’ve consumed generous amounts of it. Last December, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King decided to stop serving it.

Unfortunately, the beefy goo will continue to be served to our public school students after the USDA reportedly purchased 7 million pounds for consumption. Of course, it doesn’t appear in its slimy form when restaurants or schools deliver it to the consumer. Instead, it arrives looking like ground beef—which, technically speaking, it is.

Whip Up A Batch Of Pink Slime At Home!

And how do you make Pink Slime? Pare away all the edible elements of a cow. Take what’s left—the intestines, connective tissue, and other beef scraps—and place it into a gigantic centrifuge to separate the “beef” from the fat.

Now add ammonium hydroxide. What??? Yes, ammonium hydroxide. Because the parts are susceptible to E. coli and salmonella contamination, the mystery meat must be soaked in ammonia in order to (hopefully) kill any bacteria. Drain the ammonia and you get the pinkish sludge in the photo above.

Finally, run the “meat” through a meat grinder to give you that ground beef appearance.

Recently, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver brought this process to light in his television program. To see a disturbing video clip of his explanation, click here.

Here’s the scary part: The processing plant that produces the “slime,” Beef Products Inc., estimates its ammonia-based product is used in 70 percent of the ground beef sold in the United States. Yikes!!

Lest you decide to opt for something other than red meat, know that similar processes are done with pork and chicken to produce hot dogs, sausages, and chicken nuggets.

Until recently, the dregs from cows, pigs, and chickens weren’t considered fit for human consumption. Dog food at best.

Hungry?

Me neither.

You Can Whip Up Some Pink Slime For Your Soul, Too!

Ever stopped to consider that we can easily do the same thing with our souls? We can bypass the pink slime-based foods, eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly–and yet starve our souls. Worse yet, we can feed them the equivalent of spiritual pink slime: me-focused, flesh-feeding goo.

My goal isn’t to give you an all-inclusive list of what to not to feed your soul.  But this is important…

Limit your intake to foods with little or no nutritional value and your health will begin to deteriorate. You need nutrition.

Eat healthy but ingest a trace of arsenic at one meal, and your body probably won’t notice (please don’t try this at home!). But regular doses of just a trace will poison your body–even when eating healthy.

We are what we eat. And over time, what we consume for our souls  affects us.

Some stimuli can be fairly innocuous: news, politics, talk shows, television shows, certain kinds of music. But let’s be honest, they offer little or no nutritional value to our souls.

On the other hand, some stimuli certainly aren’t innocuous: news, politics, talk shows, television shows, certain kinds of music, depending on the content.

Seventeen days into Lent, this is a great opportunity to evaluate what we’re consuming.

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.
John 6:53–56 (NIV)

Michael co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, Colorado with Eugene Scott. For Lent, he has eliminated sports talk and classic rock from his diet.