A few months ago, there was a brouhaha over whether pizza sauce is a vegetable. It certainly is to me. But for years, I thought bacon was a vegetable. I always wondered why no one made salad bits to sprinkle on my bacon, which is a million-dollar idea if I ever heard one.

The latest food fight is over whether “pink slime” should be used in hamburgers. My gut instinct is that no, it shouldn’t be used in hamburgers. It should be left in bologna and hot dogs where it belongs.

Still, I was surprised at how many nationally known purveyors of fine burgers said they would stop using pink slime now that their secret ingredient was no longer secret. Until they said they’d stop using it, almost no one knew they were using it.

It turns out that beef “trimmings” used to be sold mainly as pet food because they contained too much E. coli and other bacteria that were harmful to humans. But then the beef industry started spraying these leftovers with an ammonia gas, killing the pathogens, and renamed them “lean finely textured beef,” which sounds so much more appetizing than “pink slime.”

It reminds me of a story I heard long ago from an old-timer in the advertising business. It seems a cannery had bought a batch of salmon with very white flesh. It tasted like salmon, but it didn’t look like salmon. Some genius in the marketing department came up with a great idea. The cannery printed “Won’t turn pink in the can” on the label, which, of course, was true.

I often wonder how many people who have savored the fish known as orange roughy in fine restaurants realize that for most of its history, that fish was known as a slimehead? There were plenty of slimeheads to go around until the name change. Now they are being hauled out of the ocean faster than they can reproduce. The orange roughy population would probably appreciate it if we started calling the fish slimeheads again.

It seems every week we have another debate about food. One year it’s trans fat, the next it’s sugar. Trans fat will kill you, sugar will kill you, cholesterol will kill you, salt will kill you, fat will kill you, carbs will kill you, not eating at all will kill you, overeating will kill you.