Pink Slime – Waste Not Want Not

Governor Rick Perry is in the news again, this time as a spokesman for Pink Slime.  He and some other carnivorous Governors, Republicans mostly, from meat eatin’, beef producin’ states have gone on a campaign to promote the wholesome nutritious goodness of finely textured beef, aka Pink Slime, which they claim has gotten a bad rap.  And maybe they’re right.

Pink Slime is nothing more than a bunch of finely blended left over scraps off the carcass of a cow treated with a spice rub of ammonium hydroxide.  Nothing wasted.  Waste Not Want Not, as the song and saying goes.   The final product is not unlike a can of wiggly Spam or pack of hot dogs that Ralph Nadar once nicknamed “pink missiles”.    What’s the big deal?   The thing is, Americans like to waste.  (As an American, I include myself in the mix, but am not necessarily talking about you, for the record, although you too may see a little of you in the pronoun we.)  We want the choicest cuts, not the scraps.  Or else we want skinless and the leanest cuts as we politely pass on the organs, those so called “sweet meats”.  Ever conscious of our weight, or just plain picky, my was I ever as a child, we don’t eat everything on our plate.  If you’ve ever bussed tables at a restaurant, you know what I mean.

We waste like no other society. We are especially fond of hazardous waste produced by our frenzied fracking behavior, all so that we can waste precious and finite fossil fuels.  We dig, drill, frack and plunder like there’s no tomorrow, as if the Mayan prediction for the end of the world were not only an inconvenient but an inescapable truth.

We are so hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels that we waste billions on tax breaks for the already ungodly profitable Big Oil companies, who scream that billions in profits are not enough.  Who cares, as long as we have cheap gas for our SUVs?

We waste time too. Lots of it.  The idiot box is full of mind numbing dumbness.  Take sports, what a distraction.  I sometimes find myself watching the Golf Channel.  And I don’t know why.  I don’t even like golf.