Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.
The ammonia is used in processed beef filler -- basically, the nasty bits. Around 15 percent of the ground beef you buy at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast food restaurants contains this ammonia doused crap. Oh, and it's also in school lunch and grocery store beef. But the supplier doesn't have to list ammonia as an ingredient because it's merely a "processing agent."
Delicious!
UPDATE: I thought I saw this in Food, Inc. Here's the clip:
That's the actual Beef Products Inc. ammonia treatment process. Obviously the New York Times item expands on the details from the movie and adds the additional information about the prevalence of pathogens in the processed filler -- despite the ammonia cleansing.