The New York Times tells a horrifying story about the shoddy beef inspection practices in our country. Although for any one who has read/seen Fast Food Nation, none of this should come as a surprise:
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.
The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. “They would not sell to us,” said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. “If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”
Here's something to think about next time you ask for your burger to be cooked medium rare:
Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.
In fact, the USDA only tests 0.05% of the nation's ground beef for bacteria that could kill you. Like so many other things happening in our country today, this is another chilling example of how powerful corporations have become and how little our elected officials can (or will) do to regulate them. It's all about profit. Public health be damned.
By the way, if you still insist on eating ground beef (and I occasionally do), it's best that you have the butcher or supermarket grind the beef for you. For more info on this, I suggest you check out books like "The Omnivores Dilemma" and "Fast Food Nation."
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