It’s time we knew
Do you think you deserve to know the details of your food’s journey from the field to your plate? I do, and it seems like a reasonable enough request. But apparently, some large food producers don’t see it that way.
Yesterday, The New York Times published an investigative article about the safety of ground beef in America. The article centers around a 22-year-old dance instructor in Minnesota who will probably never walk again because she contracted a severe case of E. coli from a single hamburger her mother grilled on a Sunday evening.
Tracing the journey of that hamburger and millions of others produced and sold in the United States led reporter Michael Moss to some startling conclusions. Among them:
* “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.” Given that, imagine how difficult it is to finger the offending company when someone gets sick from eating a tainted burger.
* Cargill, the company that made the burger the girl in the article ate, used a mixture of slaughterhouse timmings and other scraps, as well as ammonia-treated fat. “Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli,” Moss wrote.
* The United States Department of Agriculture prohibits the sale of E. coli-tainted beef. But there is no requirement that grinders test their ingredients for E. coli. In fact, many do not test because the companies they buy from will not sell them scraps if they DO test. CostCo is one of the few big companies that do test all trimmings before they run them through the grinder. And because of that, CostCo’s safety director told the Times, Tyson will not supply them.
* Properly cooking meat and washing up afterward the standard way, with hot soap and water, is not enough to kill all E. coli bacteria.
* “While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets,” Moss wrote. “Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation.” The New York Times was only able to see the redacted part when other sources provided them with the same documents, unaltered. They probably came from anonymous sources.
These are just snippets from the article. Clearly, to establish your own informed opinion, it would be best to read the Times article in its entirety. I am personally getting a little tired of hearing about things like this. We are a huge, civilized country with laws out the wahoo and we still can’t be guaranteed a burger that isn’t laced with crap? Or maybe that’s the problem.
I wouldn’t jump to point fingers at only the huge producers, either. Yes, local food is generally a safer bet, but even that cannot carry a 100% guarantee.
I see the grinder on my KitchenAid mixer getting a lot more action in the future. What do you think?
October 5, 2009 - 11:30 AM
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I’m with you. I will start grinding my own, or buy from the farmer who is on the Market every Saturday. His ground beef is 5.00 a pound, which is what I pay at Kroger for buffalo burger anyway, and tastes great.
A simple test of an eatery’s trust in their suppliers and their own sanitation procedures is to order your burger medium rare. If they say they do not cook them below medium, then I leave.
One more reason to be a vegetarian!
Thanks for spreading the word. Where can you buy locally grown – safer and saner – beef in Roanoke?
Ewww. We used to say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you but that’s not really the case anymore is it? I have a feeling that our entire food industry – not just meat – has disgusting things that go on in it. Unless you grow it and prepare it yourself you’ll never know what sort of mishandling occurs.
Our last order of beef came from a farm in Kentucky whose owner is a friend of the family. He raised it, slaughtered it and packaged it there for us so I feel rather confident in what I am eating. That’s not to say that the meat was handled properly the entire time because I wasn’t there to verify but I still feel safe eating it. For those in the local food movement or supporting family farms movement may want to look into doing what we did. We split the cow with my in-laws and the price per pound ended up being less than what it is at the store – not to mention I didn’t have to buy beef for a very long time!! It helped our budget, supported the farmer and provided us with reasonably safe meat.
Things like this are part of why we do our best to only buy Kosher or Halal meats (they go a lot farther in sanitation than commercial plants, and avoid the hind end parts of the animals), and why we also try to avoid ground beef products whenever possible. We may start looking to gridning our own beef if we want it. We have a hand-crank grinder we haven’t used much at all, but maybe now is the time to do so.
“We are a huge, civilized country with laws out the wahoo and we still can’t be guaranteed a burger that isn’t laced with crap?”
That may be the best statement on this subject ever.
Articles like this scare the crap out of me. (Sorry, had to do it!) A few years ago I read “Fast Food Nation” and I could not read it without taking month-long breaks. Each chapter taught me something new and I learned stuff I wanted to know yet didn’t. These are the prices we pay for cheap food, unfortunately. A lot of the food industry is self-inspected in part because of the way the laws are written and in part because the USDA and FDA are not funded enough to have inspectors at each place where food is processed. It is appalling that no matter what I do to make the preparation of a meal safe in my home, the inaction of a negligent processor(s) can ruin my life.
I know the problems with industrialized beef are not limited to hamburger. But at least I know that if I buy a piece of sirloin to grind at home, I know it’s all sirloin and from 1 cow. I see greater use of our Kitchen Aid grinder, too, as well as eating more venison from my parents’ freezer.
Bruce, here’s a link to the local food database I put together with help from my colleague, Matt Chittum: http://www.roanoke.com/datasphere/wb/163642
Other John makes a good point about kosher and halal meats. They are harder to find, but you can find them in this area. Check the Mediterranean market on Williamson Road or Global Foods in Blacksburg, for starters.
Kim makes a good point, too, about buying a whole or half animal and splitting the cost with a friend or relative. It’s called buying “off the hoof.” But in Virginia, the inspection requirements are not as stringent with those slaughters as they are when the meat will be processed and packaged for retail sale. Still, it is often much smaller operation than the factory farms.
But you have to know where to buy such things. Some of the farmers in our local food database sell off the hoof if you ask them.
Lori – I totally agree! I read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and I had to read just a little at a time for months, especially when he was going into detail about the food fed to the cows.
I have to admit that watching “Supersize Me” really made me want to eat french fries, though. Even though I was grossed out, you still want french fries after watching somebody else eat them for over an hour.
Sandi,
I wouldn’t necessarily say this is another reason to be vegetarian. Remember the spinach and peanut butter e-coli breakouts? Meat isn’t the only food that can cause you to get sick.
That was a very enlightening article and it’s a shame this day and age we still can’t guarantee safe food for everyone to consume. I love a good burger so I may stick to Buffalo meat or perhaps look into more local sources for my ground beef.
Bailie – I agree, the problems with our food supply are not limited to one food (beef). There was the spinach, the peanut butter, and the tomatoes. I know there’s more, but that’s all that comes to mind. Even if you eat organic veggies, that only guarantees that pesticides weren’t used. That doesn’t mean you’re safe from poop. We all take a huge risk when we purchase food not grown ourselves. It is truly scary.
There was also a green onion scare at one point.
That’s right, Lindsey! I was thinking that there was. I believe it was discovered through Taco Bell.
I think places like Tinnell’s and Fresh Market grind their ground beef once a day or more, presumably just from good meat.
After reading that article, I’d like to know which restaurants in Roanoke use fresh ground beef from real cuts of meat. I certainly want to know before I order another burger!
Hey GP,
Burger in the Square grinds their own meat daily.
Thanks for posting this link – I would LOVE to read a follow-up article outlining local restaurants and grocery stores where one can buy freshly ground hamburger made from real beef and not just “parts”. This article is going to do wonders for my diet – it has put me off of fast food burgers completely! Altho I agree with Michelle – still love the fries.
Although things have progressed somewhat, read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. You’ll never feel the same about your hamburger again.
I was just talking about that book with a friend last night, Art, and it wasn’t even in the same context. Weird!
Just last week, Kroger had their Whole Sirloin 1.99/lb. We bought 2 and had a roast cut and the rest ground into hamburger. We have bought a whole sirloin @Sam’s which is about $2/lb all the time and brought it home and ground it ourselves with our Kitchen Aid grinder, Lindsey it works pretty well just make sure you trim the fat, what little there was.
Becky, do you trim the fat because it gets hung up in the grinder or something? I was thinking a little bit of fat couldn’t hurt the texture of the burgers.
Of course you guys are right about contaminated food no matter the type of food. I AM a vegetarian (for animal cruelty and “factory farms” reasons) so that prompted the comment. Unless you grow, process and preserve your own, you are at risk. PERIOD I have even heard stories of that practice going awry. Frankly it is a miracle more of us do not die from contaminated or spoiled foods. We sure cannot stop eating. Proactive to the best of your ability is all we can really do. One big “outbreak” can really hurt an industry, but not for very long.
My bigger question would be, when will the practices and processes be forced to get better, not simply clean up contamination and go back to BAU? Who can we trust? How often do we ask that question?
From CNN/Money, about the riskiest foods:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/06/news/companies/riskiest_foods/index.htm?postversion=2009100609
Interesting that beef didn’t even make the list, Lori. I’m most disturbed by the leafy green issue. I’m not washing my greens in hot water, but how is rinsing them in cold water supposed to get rid of e. coli?
If you read Fast Food Nation ( the book was non-fiction although it was changed for the movie I believe), nothing about the way industrial meat is processed is surprising or too digusting to be believeable.
Somewhere on here there’s a blog of local producers of produce and meat – nothing’s guaranteed, but they’re worth a shot, plus you’re supporting a local business and keeping the money in the area.
Lindsey, yes the fat tends to slow down the grinder. You can leave small pieces but the bigger ones need to be trimmed.
Okay, I have to clear up some possible inaccuracies in Other John’s post early in this discussion.
The hindquarters of an animal are not kosher, but there is no rule in halal butchering that they cannot use certain parts of the animal’s body. And I think Other John is saying that if e. coli is found in animal waste, it stands to reason that waste is more likely to be caked to the fur on the hind region of the animal.
OJ also said halal and kosher meats are butchered in a cleaner environment than other meats. Sunny Khattak, who runs Global Foods in Blacksburg and butchers the meat he sells there (off-site, mind you), says they often clean everything before butchering for fear that pigs were butchered in the same place, and they are not supposed to consume any pork product. They also clean their knives if they touch anything except the animal.
But that’s only one halal butcher and one facility. I can only imagine that some facilities are cleaner than others regardless of whether it is halal, kosher or what.
I’m still looking for a good source of regulations for halal and kosher butchering. I’ve also been invited by a couple of people to watch some slaughters and see for myself.
How about don’t eat meat at all?