In case you repressed the memory—and who could blame you?—pink slime is the beefish nightmare of cow scraps and ammonia that, until 2012, was sold as ground beef, burgers, and taco filling at many of America’s supermarkets and fast-food joints. You probably remember the infamous picture: a ginormous coil of taffylike ooze squirting into a cardboard box. It’s a shot that’s worth a thousand words, none of which are yum. Around 2010, media reports began exposing the fact that this gunk, known in industry parlance as “lean finely textured beef,” or LFBT, was being hawked to the public as “100% beef.” The story spread across the Internet, and by 2012, the public’s disgust had grown so loud that McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King, Kroger, Safeway, and Walmart all swore they would stop carrying the stuff. MORE: Pink Slime–Proof Your Kitchen: How to Grind Your Own Meat  The company that made it, Beef Products, Inc. (perfect name, by the way), closed three of its four plants and laid off 700 employees. End of movie, right? Wrong, because this is a horror film, and you know you can never trust the first ending of a horror film. Last August, BPI responded to growing demand for inexpensive beef approximations by reopening one of its plants. The reason for the demand: the crippling drought that’s lately dogged the American West and hobbled beef production. As the drought drags on, BPI’s revenues are gradually coming back. As is the slime. To be sure, pink slime has never been conclusively linked to any actual health threats. To this day, BPI is wrapped up in defamation lawsuits against ABC and its reporters, and the USDA stands by its assertion that the stuff is safe for human consumption. (Though, to be fair, they say the same about olive loaf.) And as it turns out, the picture that went viral isn’t actually LFBT but a poultryish substance used for making Chicken McNuggets. So there’s that. But if you’d rather avoid the stuff, you have a few options.

  1. Don’t buy beef from manufacturers that say they’ve sworn off it, most notably, Cargill Tyson Foods, ConAgra, Sara Lee, and Kraft.
  2. Buy organic or local. While there are still no labeling requirements for foods that contain LFTB, meaning you can’t find them at the store, you can buy certified organic. The chemicals used to produce LFTB disqualify it from earning that label. And chances are your local rancher isn’t inserting pink slime into his ground cow.
  3. Make kids their own beefy lunches from local meat. The USDA declined multiple requests to forbid public schools from using LFTB in their lunches. In June 2012, 47 states said they would not buy pink slime for use in their school districts for that year (the outliers being Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota). But there is nothing stopping them—or, indeed, any of the companies that swore off the stuff when the controversy was roiling—from using it in the future.
  4. Ask. As always, if you really want to be sure your store-bought food doesn’t contain an ingredient, you have to go to the source. Ask your school district about it. Talk to the butcher at your grocery store.
  5. Channel your homesteading instincts. If all else fails, you can always grind your own beef. Just keep it away from the ammonia.