Photo by AlishaV/Flickr CC
The New York Times reports that the company selling contaminated ground beef responsible for killing two people and making 500 others sick, "stopped testing its ingredients years ago under pressure from beef suppliers."
Recall that since 1994, the USDA bans E. coli 0157:H7 in ground meat. It encourages, but does not require, meat companies to test for the pathogen. Why don't they test? Because they don't have to.
Meat companies will only produce meat safely if forced to.
If they did test, they might find toxic E. coli and have to cook or destroy the meat. As the Times reported in depth last month, testing puts meat companies in "a regulatory situation." As one food safety officer put it, slaughterhouses do not want his packing company to test for pathogens: "one, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don't do that."
Instead of requiring safety testing, the USDA uses a "restrained approach." As Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, told the Times, USDA has the power to require testing but doesn't use it because it has to take the companies' needs into consideration: "I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health."
The moral? Meat companies will only produce meat safely if forced to. As we saw yesterday, oyster companies will only produce safe oysters if they have to. That's why we need a food safety system in which all foods have to be produced safely. What will it take to get Congress to act?
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That's the least of my worries. I can cook the e.coli dead. I Can't take the antibiotics or hormones out of it. I eat beef rarely. Who knows how many of our illnesses are related to the modern scientific method of raising food.
The other issue is taste. The beef in South America and Australia tastes much better and has a different texture with less fat.
Try grass finished beef. It's closer to what you are asking for.
You can't cook the mad cow out of it, though. Prions are already significantly denatured.
Funny how there are so many Alzheimer's cases over the last couple decades, eh?
I agree with Paul. Don't we all know that a corporation will not take responsibility for our health if a lawsuit may be cheaper than testing? Cook it.
Ground beef should always be eaten fully cooked, without any pink. Commercial ground beef usually contains meat from many – up to hundreds – of animals in a single package. If any one of them is infected, the whole package is infected. Luckily for me I hate pink or red ground beef. You can still cook your steaks medium rare, though, since E Coli is exceedingly rare to unheard of in steaks, since steaks are from a single animal. Individual sick animals are normally caught before being processed, but there can be some cross-contamination before it gets caught, which is usually how E Coli contamination happens.
That article just happened to correspond with the availability of locally processed grass-fed ground beef at our farmer's market. It's available in two-pound tubes that easily go in the freezer and it's more than enough I need just cooking for two.
The worst, it always seems, is the mass-produced frozen stuff people buy in bulk at Sam's/Costo/whatever.
I'm pretty sure that CostCo is one of the few retailers that checks for E.coli. and is quite serious about food safety. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/health/08meat.html
The money quote: "Costco is one of the few large grinders to test ingredients for the pathogen as they arrive at its plant, and Mr. Wilson said Tyson had declined to sell trimmings to the company, citing its testing."
I think the linked oyster issue is a better illustration of a food safety problem than the ground beef issue. When prepared in accordance with the instructions on the package (ie. cook fully), ground beef is perfectly safe, whether or not it was contaminated with e.coli. When the directions for a product aren't followed and someone is injured as a result, that isn't a product safety issue, that's a user error issue.
If someone wants a medium burger or raw ground beef, then they need to buy something better than the bulk 5 - 20 lbs tubes they sell at Sam's club. They need to goto a butcher and have it ground or grind it themselves to minimize the risk. Raw fish is the same way. There is sushi grade and there is not sushi grade. If someone makes sushi out of non-sushi grade raw fish and gets sick, we're not going to call it a "food safety issue".
The problem is not just that supermarket ground beef is contaminated, it is that it is produced in such a disgusting fashion, with stray bits of flesh and fat from hundreds of carcasses swept up off the floor and ending up in a single hamburger (which of course increases the possibility of contamination exponentially). Even if such a hamburger is cooked to "well done," it is still too revolting to eat. I'm a happy carnivore, but I like my animals one at a time, not hundreds in a single bite. I buy my ground beef from a local butcher who grinds it himself. Is it as cheap as the industrial goo pawned off as ground beef by Sam's Club (or wherever)? Of course not. It is real meat, ground by a real butcher. You get what you pay for (and if you pay little enough, you get E. coli instead of food).
You mean millions in a single bite. E Coli are organisms, too.
If the company selling contaminated beef were in China, its CEO would likely be given life imprisonment or summary execution. Here, he continues to enjoy a 7-8 figure annual compensation. How I love free-market capitalism.
Nevertheless, the unenlightened millions who shop at supermarkets and club stores deserve to have a safe food supply. Eating undercooked beef, no matter its provenance, is a risky act.
When the directions for a product aren't followed and someone is injured as a result, that isn't a product safety issue, that's a user error issue.
Personally, I think it's a production error that brings a known (and ILLEGAL) pathogen that is extremely resistant to heat/cold and for godsakes radiation into people's homes whether they like it or not. Whether the burger is fully cooked or not, cross contamination can occur.
Raw fish is not the same way. Parasite and other nasties in raw fish are not the result of production errors, they simply exist in raw fish, are relatively easy to kill, and they are not illegal.
1. Spend $150 for a true, decent meat grinder (using a food processor is a poor compromise).
2. Buy your own quality whole cuts of beef. I like a blend of chuck, flank, sirloin flap, short rib and/or brisket, whatever happens to be priced best.
It is not that hard, and the taste is outrageous.