Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws – NYTimes.com — I challenge you to read this entire article. When I was a kid, it was common for families in the USA to all have a meat grinder and grind our own hamburger. What changed?

Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.

Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. 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.




  1. deowll says:

    Cook until done and don’t cross contaminate. You should always assume that all meat is tainted.

  2. JimD says:

    We used to have railroads, stock yards,slaughter-houses, leather districts and soap factories in every major city – BEFORE REFRIGERATION made possible central meat processing. All that infrastructure is gone now. Now we get cuts shipped all over the country. But we are back to conditions reported in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” which was the impetus for the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. But with the Repukes letting Industry “Self Inspect” or having too few Federal Inspectors (Tax Cuts for the Rich don’t leave much for “Regulations” and we know which the Repukes prefer !) Repukes don’t seem to make the connection that we all must EAT, DRINK, AND BREATH ! Gotta wonder if they have brains that can follow a logical argument ! America suffers for their GREED !!!

  3. Uncle Patso says:

    To me, the crux of the entire article is this paragraph:

    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.”

    So the way to avoid responsibility is not to prevent disease, but only to make it impossible to prove you’re responsible. That’s Bart Simpson ethics (“I didn’t do it, nobody saw me and you can’t prove anything!”). I’m only surprised they haven’t set up slaughterhouses and meat packing plants inside sewers to save 10 cents on rent.

    # 14 David:
    “…get a meat thermometer and cook the meat to 160 degrees…”

    Yeah, try and grill a hamburger with a meat thermometer sticking out the side of it. But definitely _no_pink_center_!

    Geez, why am I having such a craving for a hamburger right now? You’d think I’d never want to look at one again, but if there were one in front of me right now, it would be gone in seconds.

  4. C. Essex says:

    Readers shouldn’t assume that prior to ingesting “bad meat” her colon wasn’t already a cesspool of bacteria.

  5. amodedoma says:

    Industrialized food, yeach! eat fresh or die slow.

  6. amodedoma says:

    #35

    The human body contains 20 times more microbes than it does cells. Actually we’re all just big bags of puss. So yeah just about everybody’s got a sespool in their intestine.


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