A FOOD WHOLESALER in Finland has been forced to re-brand its meatballs as simply ‘balls’ due to the lack of verifiable meat content in them per Finnish law.

Food giant Kesko has had to relabel the popular product because it contains only ‘machine-recovered’ animal parts, those being the scraps left over after the more recognisable meat has been separated from the bone. Lovely.

The product is now called pyöryköitä, or ‘balls’ when translated to English.

“Mechanically recovered parts cannot be described as meat,” Kesko research manager Heta Rautpalo told Finnish news agency YLE.

It’s still worthwhile to use those ingredients somehow and they are well-suited for use in these kinds of ground meat products.

The product in question has been deemed to have zero meat content. Rautpalo argues that ‘these balls have the equivalent of 52% meat, it’s just the parts used aren’t allowed to be described as meat’. So that’s alright then.

Finnish meat industry standards may be quite stringent when it comes to the recovery of animal parts, but that isn’t always the case elsewhere.

In the US there are at least three different kinds of recovery process, the product of two of which have been colloquially dubbed ‘pink slime’ and ‘white slime’.  Appetising.

The US Department of Agriculture sparked uproar in 2012 when they bought seven million pounds of said slime for use in school lunches.

Read: Why your food can include a United Nations of meats and you will probably never know

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