For years, McDonald's has fervently denied claims that its chicken-based menu items are made with a soft-serve-looking concoction known colloquially as pink slime. You may have seen the accusations yourself in a chain email or viral Facebook post — likely attached to an infamous and untraceable image of so-called pink slime being deposited into a cardboard box which has floated around the internet since 2010 or so. Most descriptions of the picture claimed this was how McDonald's restaurants produced Chicken McNuggets, in a process that involved crushing the entire bird to create a pink substance — comprised of "bones, eyes, guts, and all," — which is then washed in ammonia and artificially flavored.
According to McDonald's, it's just not true. The megacorporation has denied the accusation for more than a decade, making a insisting that its chicken nuggets are made exclusively with "USDA-inspected boneless white-meat chicken — cut from the chicken breast, tenderloins, and rib meat." So, no eyeballs, it seems.
What is pink slime? Despite the sensationalist rumors, pink slime is a real thing. But it's not in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, nor is it even poultry. In food production, it's known as lean, finely-textured beef or boneless lean beef trimmings, and the company hasn't used it in its hamburger products since 2011.
That process employs a centrifuge to extract the last bits of meat from fatty trimmings that can be used in ground beef products. Pink slime sometimes g.
