Do you know what’s in your burger?

Well it could be “pink slime” which is the name for ammonia-treated ground beef.

Yes, you heard right.

Pink slime is a filler and is in 70 percent of the ground beef sold at supermarkets and up to 25 percent of each American hamburger patty, as reported on ABC. Food advocates are rallying to get it off supermarket shelves and school lunch trays in the U.S..

Houston resident Bettina Siegel, whose blog The Lunch Tray focuses on kids’ food,  started an online petition on Change.org asking government officials to “put an immediate end to the use of ‘pink slime’ in our children’s school food.”  Since she started the petition on March 6, there are had more than 220,000 signatures.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver raised awareness and persuaded McDonald’s to remove the pink slime from their burgers.  At the end of 2011 three mega-chains, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Burger King, all announced that they would be discontinuing use of the product.

Pink slime is a low-cost ingredient in ground beef made from fatty left- over meat trimmings from other cuts. The product is made by South Dakota-based Beef Products Inc., which treats the beef with ammonia hydroxide to kill pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli.  The bits are heated and spun to remove most of the fat, then compressed into blocks for use in ground meat.

Obviously this is alarming in the U.S. where school lunches are the norm.  But what worries me in Canada is how much of this filler is used in ground meats at the grocery store.

Thankfully “pink slime” and ammonium hydroxide are not used in ground beef says Heather Travis, the director of public relations for Canada Beef.

What do you think about all the talk about pink slime?