People want to know about their food. Where it was grown, how, what’s been added and if it’s safe.

The N.Y. Times, as usual, gets that little bit right in a commentary yesterday, but wrongly thinks right-to-know is something new, that media amplification is something new because of shiny new toys, and offers no practical suggestions on what to do.

The term pink slime was was coined in 2002 in an internal e-mail by a scientist at the Agriculture Department who felt it was not really ground beef. The term was first publicly reported in The Times in late 2009.

In April 2011, celebtard chef Jamie Oliver helped create a more publicly available pink slime yuck factor and by the end of 2011, McDonald’s and others had stopped using pink slime.

On March 7, 2012, ABC News recycled these bits, along with some interviews with two of the original USDA opponents of the process (primarily because it was a form of fraud, and not really just beef).

Industry and others responded the next day, and although the story had been around for several years, the response drove the pink slime story to gather media momentum – a story with legs.

BPI said pink slime was meat so consumers didn’t need to be informed, and everything was a gross misunderstanding. BPI blamed media and vowed to educate the public. Others said “it’s pink so it’s meat” and that the language of pink slime was derogatory and needed to be changed. USDA said it was safe for schools but quickly decided that schools would be able to choose whatever beef they wanted, pushing decision-making in the absence of data or labels to the local PTA. An on-line petition was launched.

Sensing the media taint, additional retailers rushed to proclaim themselves free of the pink stuff.
BPI took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, the favored reading choice for pink slime aficionados, and four mid-west governors banded together to repeat the same erroneous messages during a media-show-and-tell at a BPI plant. Because political endorsements rarely work, and the story had spread to the key demographic of burger eaters, others sensed opportunity in the trashing of BPI. Wendy’s, Whole Foods, Costco, A&P, Publix and others launched their own media campaigns proclaiming they’ve never used the stuff and never would.

Guess they didn’t get their dude-it’s-beef T-shirts.

These well-intentioned messages only made things worse for the beef producers and processors they were intended to protect.

Here’s what can be learned for the next pink slime. And there will be lots more.
Lessons of pink slime
• don’t fudge facts (is it or is it not 100% beef?)
• facts are never enough
• changing the language is bad strategy (been tried with rBST, genetically engineered foods, doesn’t work)
• telling people they need to be educated is arrogant, invalidates and trivializes people’s thoughts
• don’t blame media for lousy communications
• any farm, processor, retailer or restaurant can be held accountable for food production – and increasingly so with smartphones, facebook and new toys
• real or just an accusation, consumers will rightly react based on the information available
• amplification of messages through media is nothing new, especially if those messages support a pre-existing world-view
• food is political but should be informed by data
• data should be public
• paucity of data about pink slime that is publicly available make statements like it’s safe, or it’s gross, difficult to quantify
• relying on government validation builds suspicion rather than trust; if BPI has the safety data, make it public
• what does right-to-know really mean? Do you want to say no?
• if so, have public policy on how information is made public and why
• choice is a fundamental value
• what’s the best way to enable choice, for those who don’t want to eat pink slime or for those who care more about whether a food will make their kids barf?
• proactive more than reactive; both are required, but any food provider should proudly proclaim – brag – about everything they do to enhance food safety.
• perceived food safety is routinely marketed at retail; instead market real food safety so consumers actually have a choice and hold producers and processors – conventional, organic or otherwise – to a standard of honesty.
• if restaurant inspection results can be displayed on a placard via a QR code read by smartphones when someone goes out for a meal, why not at the grocery store or school lunch?
• link to web sites detailing how the food was produced, processed and safely handled, or whatever becomes the next theatrical production – or be held hostage

Was the pink slime controversy really a “stunning display of social media power,” or just new-fangled risk amplification and a reflection of how bored many are?

The Washington Post, a print media outlet, arrived at the pink slime party yesterday to rehash what’s long ago happened, recycling sound bites in a lousy attempt to offer insight into how public opinion is transformed into beliefs. Worse, the Post provides a compelling reason why newspapers are in decline: no new facts or analysis, nothing new that on-line diggers didn’t discover and display weeks ago.

Social media changes the details, not the basics: one version of ‘ole timey social media was called a lynch mob.

Cue the cute cats video: it will get a lot more hits than pink slime, and way more than sushi slime. But only one, sushi slime, or imported frozen raw Nakaochi Scrape tuna product from a single tuna processing facility in India, has now been linked to 160 confirmed cases of Salmonella Bareilly, up from 141.

The most frequently asked question with public and scientific crowds at any food safety jamfest I’ve done over the past 20 years: Is food too clean?

It comes from that adage, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

But what if it kills you? Or causes irreparable damage, like 8-year-old Brit, Elisabeth Willoughby, who contracted toxocariasis, probably from contact with dog doo while crawling in the park as an infant. Her right eye was permanently scarred by the roundworm parasite.

Watching daughter Sorenne slowly recover from whatever made her stronger the other night via 14 vomits and five diarrheal episodes reinforced, to me, how little is known.

The concept of exposing people to germs at an early age to build immunity is known as the hygiene hypothesis.

I’m not an immunologist, but the idea makes biological sense; I do, however, get concerned with the details, and generalizations.

Medical types have suggested that the hygiene hypothesis explains the global increase of allergic and autoimmune diseases in urban settings. It has also been suggested that the hypothesis explains the changes that have occurred in society and environmental exposures, such as giving antibiotics early in life.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) reported in Science last month that exposing germ-free mice to microbes during their first weeks of life, but not when exposed later in adult life, led to a normalized immune system and prevention of diseases.

Moreover, the protection provided by early-life exposure to microbes was long-lasting, as predicted by the hygiene hypothesis.

"These studies show the critical importance of proper immune conditioning by microbes during the earliest periods of life," said Richard Blumberg, MD, chief for the BWH Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endoscopy, and co-senior study author, in collaboration with Dennis Kasper, MD, director of BWH's Channing Laboratory and co-senior study author. "Also now knowing a potential mechanism will allow scientists to potentially identify the microbial factors important in determining protection from allergic and autoimmune diseases later in life."

Does that mean if your kid gets an infectious disease later in life, parents are negligent for not exposing them to a little infectious disease earlier in life?

It all sounds romantically agrarian – a little dirt is good for you – until specifics get in the way; specifics like, it’s your kid.

My answer to questioning minds goes something like this:

We know immune systems take several years to develop in young children, and things start to go downhill after 55. (Freedom 55?) A little dirt may be good for kids, but there will always be some who, through genetics, environment and other unknowns, will be more susceptible to disease than others. And we’re not smart enough to know who those individuals are. The good ole’ days usually included stories about a family that lost a kid. And it was probably some kind of infectious disease. Western societies have enough science and enough affluence to decide, one is too many.

Then there’s the policy. I can’t image the agriculture minister or secretary announcing that investments in a lot of this food safety stuff would be better spent on other societal priorities. We’ve done a cost-benefit analysis and decided it’s better for everyone to get a little sick. We’re going to lose a few, and we don’t know who those few (or many) are, but it’s a cost-effective approach.

T. Olszak, D. An, S. Zeissig, M. P. Vera, J. Richter, A. Franke, J. N. Glickman, R. Siebert, R. M. Baron, D. L. Kasper, R. S. Blumberg. Microbial exposure during early life has persistent effects on natural killer T cell function. Science, 2012; DOI: 10.1126/science.1219328

As the usual suspects weigh in with ol’ timey public relations strategies and superficial observations of social media in the , it’s good to poke fun at all things foodie. Satirical takedowns of the pretentious and pompous never go out of style, regardless of the medium.

From Eater, a cautionary tale for this modern life: the below anthem from The Key of Awesome! warns against the perils of tweeting before eating. A send up of Pet Shop Boys songs, it features "culinary paparazzi," a lobster and a cupcake posing like super models, and an unhappy ending. For the next time you think, "it's unthinkable to dine out and not record it/Want the world to know I can afford it."