School to stop serving LFTB cheeseburgers
Edgar School District administrator Dr. Cari Guden on Wednesday (today) said the school will stop serving cheeseburgers in its hot lunch program confi rmed to contain Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB) and will switch to an alternative without the additive.
“I talked to Rebecca Larson, Edgar’s food service director, and she will be ordering a new product for our burgers for next week and all future times when burgers are served,” she said. “There is no LFTB in this product.”
Several weeks ago, The Record-Review asked administrators at Edgar, Athens, Marathon and Stratford school districts whether the hamburger they served in hot lunch meals contained LFTB.
Administrators at Athens, Marathon and Stratford school districts said their hamburger meat and patties were LFTB-free.
Guden reported that while regular ground beef and hamburger patties used at Edgar have not included LFTB, a Tyson-brand cheeseburger served at the school did.
Guden said she and other school staff were unaware the cheeseburgers contained LFTB. The administrator said LFTB-free beef patties sold by JTM Group will replace the cheeseburgers.
LFTB is a product sold by Beef Products, Inc., a South Dakota company. The material is created by warming beef trimmings to 100 degrees to melt off the fat and spraying the ground up trimmings with ammonia to kill bacteria that would make humans sick.
The USDA has held LFTB is “safe, wholesome and nutritious” and since 2018 that it can be labeled “ground beef.”
It is estimated that 75 percent of hamburger patties sold in the United States in 2009 contained some percentage of LFTB and that 5.5 million pounds of the material was used in school hot lunches.
Starting that year, news outlets in the United States started reporting use of LFTB and, following an ABC News series in 2012, Beef Products, Inc. closed plants in Amarillo, Texas, Garden City, Kan., and Waterloo, Iowa.
Beef Products, Inc. sued Disney Corp., owner of ABC News, for $1.5 billion in lost business and reached a $177 million out of court settlement in 2018 following a 17-day trial.
ABC News admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.
