Markets at work: Pink Slime

Several months ago the Internet got excited about “pink slime,” something the meat industry makes from leftover cow parts to get more meat out of cows. Videos like this one began circulating the web and getting mixed up with gross pictures like this one (which seems to actually be chicken nugget slime – as best I can tell, beef “pink slime” stole the name from chicken “pink slime,” which is actually slimy, whereas the beef “slime” just looks like solid little meat trimmings.)

Anyway, food activists like Jamie Oliver started raising awareness about the facts that 70% of beef in America contains these leftover parts, originally fit for dog food but treated with ammonia to make them edible for humans, and the FDA says they don’t have to list ammonia as an ingredient because it’s a processing element or whatever. They use ammonia to kill the E. coli that’s more likely to be found in the leftover meat, but the ammonia smells bad, and as they try to find a good balance there have been some E. coli outbreaks in recent years. Caught between ammonia and E. coli, we’re supposed to be scared of these unsafe trimmings and stop eating them and get industries to stop using them.

Well, all that activism has begun paying off. In January 2012, McDonald’s announced they would stop using the pink slime in their beef. Lots of links say Taco Bell and Burger King are stopping, too, though I can’t find any good sources on that. But the activists were rejoicing.

Then a few days ago, a bunch of supermarkets announced they would stop using the slime too, including Safeway, SUPERVALU, and Food Lion. On Thursday, the biggest chain, Kroger, joined in. All over the food industry, pink slime is dropping faster than government revenue during a recession.

Is pink slime really that much worse than other kinds of meat? Maybe not. Some in the industry are fighting back against what they see as misinformation with websites like PinkSlimeIsAMyth.com. I don’t know how dangerous the stuff really is, but let’s not lose sight of what is happening here: consumers are demanding better quality meat, and businesses are responding!

This is how markets are supposed to work. The government didn’t have to regulate the ammonia away; businesses stopped using it because consumers demanded it! In fact, the slowest responder to this outcry seems to be the government itself. Activists now have their sights set on the USDA, which just announced it will buy 7 million pounds of the stuff for school lunches even as corporations all over the world are abandoning it.

Now don’t get me wrong; we’re not three steps away from a frictionless libertarian fantasy here. There are still plenty of food industry practices to be concerned about, and activists need to focus the public’s attention on some new state laws that would make it harder to expose dangerous procedures. But just as I want to rejoice in good capitalism from good businesses, I want to rejoice in these good business responses to consumer demands about negative practices.

More importantly, I don’t think this is a fluke. In fact, as the Internet matures, I think we’ll see this kind of thing happen more often. We need information to flow smoothly to ensure honest government and to help markets work. This doesn’t always happen – which is part of why I’m not a pure libertarian – but technology is helping it happen more than ever before, giving us the tools to learn about government secrecy and to prevent attacks by those who would try to restrict those tools. (It was only a couple months ago that Internet communities completely destroyed the strong Congressional support for SOPA.)

Consumers have always been able to demand products that businesses had incentives to supply. But now technology lets us join together in large enough numbers to demand that businesses stop doing sketchy things that they then have the incentives to stop doing, even if the slow-moving, lobby-infested government never says they have to.

It’s not perfect, and sometimes I think this technology also allows the public to unfairly criticize businesses or go too far, but in general I think it’s pretty awesome. Individual consumers are becoming more empowered than ever before, and I’m excited to see what we do next.