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.
What changed? People got weak and lazy. It is easier and cheaper to get a tube of ground beef from the factory then get some good beef and have the butcher grind it for you. Plus those old hand grinders required a bit of work and that is takes away for TV time.
Nowadays get grinders that attach onto those stand mixers, which is what wife and me use because I like to know what I am eating.
OK–I read the whole thing. Dragged a little near the end. My reaction:
1. Stories about individual people getting violently ill are not very informative as idiosyncratic responses are just that.
2. I don’t see any reason that high fat trimmings need to come from more than one source? While I can “assume” its all economically driven, I also assume each cow has more than enough fat to balance the hamburger that is desired?
3. Costco is proving admirable in so many different ways. Wonder what WalMart and K-Mart are doing?
4. “Risk” is always difficult to truly assess. Is cheap hamburger worth the 30 cents a pound difference? What would adequate testing actually cost?
5. I think the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” said to never eat anything with more than 5 ingredients in it.==that should have covered the patties in question.
Article is a good read. Light on analysis/recommendations but reveals good basic info.
Thanks.
I don’t know about others, but I shop for raw ingredients almost exclusively. Sure, I’ll buy a box of crackers / cereal / granola / oatmeal occasionally, but if you look in my shopping bags you’ll find whole fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins to occupy 90% of my outlay. And because of that, my food costs are ENORMOUS! I also buy most produce and meat from farmers markets so I can avoid the whole feed lot industry. I like my meat to be a living animal, rather than a “living” animal on the feed lot.
I could probably save 50% of my food bill by purchasing processed, massive agro business “foods”. But, I would rather sacrifice some cable TV channels than my health. Even though I get free health care!
A very interesting anecdote from Fast Food Nation was related to the meat processing plants in the US. The workers there LOVE when meat is processed for export to European markets. The whole disassembly line slows right down to ensure safety of the meat handling and the handlers. Europeans do not want dangerous meat. Americans love it. It’s 99c a pound after all!
#3–named==W – T – FFFF!
You’re telling us that USA factories will slow down to properly process Europe headed meat and then speed up when that order is done to process domestic orders?
aaaaahhhhh. Golly. I assume its true, cause I read it here, but Holy Molie.
This is a duplicate post. Same article posted on 10/4 by Cherman.
Named,
Agreed. My family’s grocery shopping looks like yours. And I go to a local butcher, yes one exists here in Dallas (Oak Lawn & Lemmon next to Lucky’s), when we want beef once a month…
Yeah. I miss listening to Amos and Andy on the radio, too.
Of course, according to the lawyers it’s her fault because any woman who isn’t a church-going, saving her virginity for marriage, Republican voting, Bible thumping Puritan is a super slut who deserves all the evils in the world.
Oh wait, scrap that; that’s what NFL lawyers use against rape cases.
I thought if you thoroughly cook ground beef, it can’t make you sick. Am I wrong? E. Coli is bad and ground beef is especially susceptible because you mix together the inside and outside of the cut of beef. I can grill a steak and seer it on each side, and that is enough since the outside is heated high enough to kill the E. Coli. With ground beef you need to heat the inside high enough as well.
#9. No, I think you are right. Unfortunately there is a stigma attached to people who order their meats thoroughly cooked. It seems to upset the staff……
Like I care.
#9–Benji==as I read the article it stressed that just a few microbes could multiple quickly and make you sick.
A VERY common source of contamination for properly cooked chicken, eggs, meat is to flip it using the same spatula or spoon you used to prepare the meat before cooking. Or to use the same cutting board to slice the meat after cooking==that sort of thing.
I use NO food safety techniques and have 4-5 raw eggs a week. So far, no illness. The e-coli fairy is no doubt biding her time.
10 McCullough,
You mean to tell me that your steak can’t walk under it’s own power? BLASPHEMER!
If my steak doesn’t moo with eat cut it’s over done…
The part that I find the most interesting about the article is the claim that big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli. I don’t quite understand how they think having to recall 844,812 pounds of meat and dealing with multimillion-dollar claims from people who got sick is a fair trade-off.
At the end of the day, if you’re going to be cooking this kind of thing, get a meat thermometer and cook the meat to 160 degrees for a delicious pathogen free meal.
#10, #13 Ground beef should always be thoroughly cooked.
Steak isn’t ground, so it just needs charred on the outside and pink and warm on the inside.
#11 I never thought of the spatula and cutting board stuff. I regularly wash my cutting board and spatula while the meat is cooking because I know such meat drippings are contaminated. I worked in many restaurants so it is a habit. I cook safely without thinking about it.
As for eggs, I never use uncooked eggs, but I keep eggs long enough that I am worried about that kind of thing.
14 David,
If you recall, there was a major outbreak of ecoli tainted meat, 1.4 million pounds I believe that went all the way back to 2001… They would not disclose where the meat was sold because it was “proprietary” information…
There is no punishment for these companies. Their lobbyists own the government. And that’s why Eidard posted that article about the lobbyists getting bounced from boards… it’s probably one of the biggest news items around. Check it out. Its on the blog right here…
13 Benjamin,
Ground beef needs to be thoroughly cooked if it’s a carcass ground up at a factory. but, if you get some whole chuck and your butcher grinds it for you from the cut of meat you can cook it any way you like. Hell, you can probably eat it as tartare, but I would recommend hand chopping it instead.
#17 Good point. I never buy packaged meat. I will have to ask if the butcher orders it ground or grind it himself.
I would much rather eat steaks than ground beef, but ground beef is an ingredient in a lot of recipes.
18 Benjamin,
I’ll bet he has it ground ahead of time. But, they will never refuse your money if you buy the chuck and make the request…
And of course, you can have anything ground… even mix up a sirloin with some chuck!
I happen to be lucky enough to still have a local butcher. What changed is no more personal responsibility. Big corporate farms and meat processors don’t have to deal with a person they know who gets sick. They just let accountants run the business who will take out any process that adds cost. Since you aren’t personally responsible, you don’t care if people get sick. You don’t have to deal with the consequences.
More and more of this will happen, and the politicians will continue doing the wrong thing – passing laws that punish those who still have personal responsibility (your local farmers and meat handlers – see the last food safety bill for a good example) and letting big corporate interests continue to kill citizens.
What changed is that skilled butchers are no more. You no longer have a local butcher with years of training cutting your meat and personally knowing who he is serving.
Instead we have sloppy and contaminated butcher factories that don’t know how to cut cattle to avoid getting poop on the blades and equipment. And they don’t care. They hire illegal aliens for less than legal pay, give them insane work quotas, and who knows if they were even trained in the US or their home country on how to cut meat. How hard is it for an illegal alien to lie that they were a trained butcher back in Guadalajara?
#21, Isn’t a rabbi required to supervise the killing of beef cows? Are they even cutting corners on Kosher beef?
Sick story but good that it was posted. If only San Diego allow raising chickens I be doing it. With that and my vegetable garden I’m set 🙂
#12
I also recommend Michael Pollan for those who are unaware of what to eat. To my people this isn’t new stuff about eating natural foods. It’s all the research he put in to find about what’s being put out there. It really doesn’t take much to feed a family of four. Heck, my Mom garden to feed the 9 of us vegetables and we drove 2 hours to a farm to buy the meats, fresh! You cannot be that lazy to not worry about your health and the health of your family members.
Even now, my sister has bought a small lot of land just so she can garden (mainly) and raise a few chickens. Many of our people do this. I mean, we’re paying someone for their land that’s 30min to hours away just so we can garden! Again, how lazy can one get? O.o
Grow your own vegetables, fruits if you can and buy your meat from a source you at least can trust they are handling the meat properly. I love Costco meat if I crave for them. I wouldn’t dare shop for meats at Vons, Safeway and such. Nasty looking meats compare to Costco.
The one off supermarkets are the worst even they they offer cheaper prices on meats. That’s because they trick you by coloring the meat a nice fresh red or whatever color meat you are buying. What you have underneath is brown and almost spoiled…nasty!!!
I can’t recommend it enough, shop at Costco if you can you won’t be disappointed with the meat. Or better yet have a friend buy a steak from your local supermarket and the same type at Costco and make the comparision. By this I mean look at the texture of the meat inside and out. You’ll be sicken as I am with the supermarket :/
I rarely eat ground beef in the US since I live most of the time in Brazil. There I eat beef 75% of the time.
6 months ago I was living in Washington, D.C. and bought a pound of ground beef for the first time in the US in nearly a decade.
I became so ill the next day and had to live in the bathroom for 2 days to get rid of it all.
What happened to the food industry in the US? Is it trying to kill us all?
I grew up in the US and it was never this bad when I was a child. Today I am terrified to by any beef, fish or chicken.
#25 It’s all about price in the U.S. now. People don’t seem to care about what they have to do to get the prices down that low.
Cooking meat well done isn’t enough. Food poisoning doesn’t just come from injesting the bacteria itself, but also from the toxins they produce. Tainted meat can be cooked thoroughly to kill the bacteria but the toxins will remain, even if the meat is well done.
A major cause of E.coli is that the cattle are on a grain (corn) based diet. Feedlot grain makes the animals more acidic, which in turn makes the E. coli more acid-resistant so that the acids in our stomachs can’t combat the E.coli bacteria. If you want to have safer meat, you need to eat grassfed meat. I write a blog about this (www.kolfoods.blogspot.com) and started a kosher, grass-fed meat business (www.kolfoods.com).
Here is a study by Cornell University about this very issue:
Russell, J. B., F. Diez-Gonzalez, and G. N. Jarvis. “Potential Effect of Cattle Diets on the Transmission of Pathogenic Escherichia Coli to Humans” Microbes Infect 2, no. 1 (2000): 45-53.
We need to go back to the concept of the local butcher shop.
Everything corporations touch turns to crap, literally.
AND the quality of FOOD in the USA??
has gone to SPIT.
To many cut costs…
Beef = e coli, mad cow, how many reasons do you need to GIVE IT UP ??