/ Xeni Jardin / 3:50 pm Sun Oct 4, 2009

Report: Woman paralyzed by E. coli-tainted hamburger

American megacorp Cargill, which brought in $116.6 billion in revenue last year, is in the spotlight this week around the story of Stephanie Smith: the 22 year old children's dance instructor was paralyzed from the waist down after eating E. coli-tainted hamburger traced back to the meat supplier.

She was in a coma for nine weeks (that's her, hospitalized, in the photo below), and can now no longer walk. "Ground beef is not a completely safe product," one food safety expert in the article is quoted. Well, no shit. Snip from an extensive investigative report in Sunday's New York Times:

meat.hospital.650.jpg
The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled "American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties." Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Using a combination of sources -- a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger -- allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

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, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together.

E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection (New York Times)

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  1. Love the “Well, no shit” comment – personally I expect food with the US Department of Agriculture seal on it to be safe. I guess I’m not omnipotent like the bloggers on boing boing.

  2. This is horrible, and that meat sounds disgusting.

    On a little bit of a side note, I was surprised while in the US that you order hamburger patties cooked like a steak – e.g. rare, medium etc. It seems pretty unsafe to me since minced meat can harbour bacteria that a slab of steak doesn’t. In NZ we don’t get the option of how we want our hamburger patty cooked – it just comes cooked.

  3. These food giants broadcast on south American radio stations to attract workers willing to be maimed for life just to work for slave wages and to live in America.
    —–” They’reeee,,,,FOOOD!”

  4. Food is sketchy anymore if you are poor.

    Hundred plus years ago you had to almost had to have a lot of money to afford to be fat. Now you almost have to have a lot of money to be thin.

  6. @johnnyaction: It is possible to eat frugally, healthily, and inexpensively (I’m thinking: simple, nonpackaged foods, much less meat, much more plant-based foods, bulk grains and beans and fresh fruits and veggies).

    But I get your point.

  7. @apoxia While I enjoy a borderline rare steak, I always have my burgers cooked to well done. The grinding process just leaves too much chance for surface contamination to make its way deep into the patty.

    You can see these cheap patties in a lot of stores in most frozen food aisles. My wife bought some once and instead of just ground chuck I saw crap like soy flour and beef hearts. NO THANKS.

  8. @Apoxia,

    It depends. Some states require restaurants to cook hamburg medium well or well done, no choice beyond that.

  9. #1 – Yeah, I get really annoyed whenever I’m asked how well I want a burger cooked. Thankfully, that’s not a universal practice – I’ve run into about as many places that cook it through as ask you.

  10. @shecky, I didn’t say that doing so was a fool-proof way to avoid food-borne illness. I was addressing the notion that the only way to eat a healthy diet is to have above average financial resource.

    That said, I personally plan to avoid Big Beef.

  11. Funny, my mom just called me to warn me about ground beef. As I told her: If you cook the meat properly, it will kill the E. coli.

  12. In general, we’re better off eating food that’s as unprocessed as possible, and ideally as much as possible grown by yourself.

    Also any reduction you can make in your consumption of meat is beneficial both for your body and for the health of the planet!

  13. …Why is it always the privately-helds that do this kind of thing? I mean, even Aramark didn’t turn completely evil until a dozen people bought all the stock and converted the place into an enormous, closed-door LLC.

  15. So if you’re disinclined to eat meat after reading this, would you also stay inside after hearing of someone hit by lightning or run over in traffic?

    Awful thing to have happen, but considering the people who ate the stuff with no ill effects I wouldn’t start panicking about it. Cook well done, move on…

  16. Geez, I wonder why a ground-up carcass might be unsafe to eat?
    I’ll never understand why people who would freak out over the idea of even touching a dead human body (and would probably wash their hands obsessively if they accidentally did) would be willing to put the body of a dead animal *in their mouths*. Seriously, folks, we’re all made of the same stuff.

  17. Ouch – the US food industry is in a sorry state. I’m reasonably confident that Japan does a better job – the exacting attention to health and safety (food safety) here has to be seen to be believed. Still thinking twice about my next burger though.

  19. 1.) Hamburger is ground up meat and offal (off fall or trimmings) so it can be just about anything that’s meatlike.

    2.) Because of the grinding process, any contaminants are well distributed throughout the product.

    3.) The bigger the feedlot, the more antibiotics and the more likelihood of getting mutated or resistant bacteria. I grew up dairying and wading in cow dung, you don’t die of being around healthy cows.

    4.) One more reason to stay away from feedlot beef, grain fed cows are the equivalent of overweight, diabetic 25 year old couch potato humans. They’re being slaughtered for food just before they die of the bad diet they’re being fed.

    Buy only ground steak, by law it should be just that, no other crud, and cook the stuff thoroughly. I won’t eat ground meat anymore unless I cook it myself, anyone who offers rare burgers is an idiot.

  20. @12- If it makes you feel better, I’d probably try a good filet o’ longpork were it offered. Curiosity as to what human’d taste like, if nothing else.

    It’s all cultural, though– cheese is godawfully disgusting if you think about it. Shrimp go on the menu, but roaches don’t? Muscle tissue is fine if it’s from the haunch, but not from the heart or intestine? Or entirely otherwise in a different culture…

  21. Cargill didn’t earn $116B, rather their revenue was $116B. As a private company, they don’t need to reveal their earnings.

  22. It seems pretty unsafe to me since minced meat can harbour bacteria that a slab of steak doesn’t.< ?i>

    So what?

    Good burgers aren’t ground together from scraps from eight different sources in a meatpacking plant and then frozen and shipped so a restaurant can thaw and cook them to a well-done leatheriness. Good burgers are made from slabs of steak, right there in the restaurant, so there’s far less opportunity for contamination in the first place. If you buy slabs of chuck and sirloin and grind it coarsely and shape it into a patty right in your kitchen, the odds that it’s going to become contaminated and make you ill if you cook it rare are pretty negligible. Hey, here’s a good way to tell if you’re at a restaurant that serves a good burger: if they’re so afraid of getting sued that they won’t serve it at anything less than medium-well, it’s probably not a good burger.

    Buying pre-made frozen ground beef from a supermarket is dumb.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to my local bar to drink double IPAs and have their 10-ounce prime-beef burger. Cooked medium rare.

  24. Yeah, I get really annoyed whenever I’m asked how well I want a burger cooked

    The nerve of those restaurants that give a damn what their customers want! Do you get bugged when they ask you what side dishes you’d like, too?

  25. I grind my own. A chuck roast and round steak (or sirloin depending on what you like) are cheapish in price, and I can keep the equipment clean from bacteria in ways that these massive processing plants can not. You don’t even need a fancy grinder. I’ve gotten excellent results from a blender (it’s a little gross, but it can make a great burger).

    And, if that fails, buy the meat that’s been ground in the store and build your own patties. Anything is better than those processed, frozen things.

  26. As I remember there were more E.coli scares in tainted produce than meat recalls. peanut butter, spinach, tomatoes or lettuce anyone? Guess what herbivores, you get to play dinner roulette with the rest of us now.

    “Broccoli’s a side dish, folks. Always was, always will be, ok? Eggplant tastes like eggplant. But meat tastes like murder, and murder tastes pretty goddamn good.” – Denis Leary

    Remember you’re all just one plane crash and a few missed meals from being my next food source.

  27. @1, I’d guess, having only spent a few months in America that the places that offer you burgers cooked properly (that is, not to death) are also the places that grind the meat themselves and as such have a fairly low risk of nasties.

    Sure, it’s not 100% safe, but I’d much rather eat a bloody rare burger ground by someone who’s livelihood depends on feeding people safe food every day, than a faceless megacorp grinding up any old crap and selling it in a past of 72 for three quid.

    Personally I grind my own meat for burgers, cook them medium rare, I also eat raw steak, just so I know the quality and how to treat it before I start cooking. Never gotten ill from either practice in 10 years, take from that what you will.

    @12, quite honestly, given the chance I’d try people, sure it’s pretty risky, but hell I’d hate to miss out on good food because of a bit of risk.

  28. This is disgusting; I hope this woman and her family can successfully sue Cargill, but of course, I doubt it.

  30. After reading “Bushwhacked” by Molly Ivins, I decided that eating uber processed meat was probably a bad idea.

    From the book: “Republicans use the USDA to pay off their contributors in the red states. The result of that crude electoral calculus is laissez-faire food-safety policy whenever a Republican is in the White House.”

    Of course, better food safety would be great, but it would be even better to try to eat locally produced meat & produce as much as possible (if you can afford it).

  32. Cook burger properly, eat, repeat.

    “Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner”

    The correct person to sue would be her mother, for negligence. But she doesn’t have money (and/or is family), and Cargill clearly has deeper pockets anyways.

    I like my steaks charred on the outside, mooing inside. I like my burgers juicy, but brown inside. Next!

  34. 25% less – ’cause y’know, 25% less than 116 billion would just put them in the poorhouse.

  35. Cicada, beware of the metaphor.
    Now come on, we’re hardly speaking of meat here: this is err… something so much processed, outsourced and uncontrolled that, if by chance it doesn’t kill you right away won’t make you all too healthy either. The chances of living a lifetime and not get hit by lightning or a car are by many order of magnitude better.

  36. At a restaurant I would never, ever order a burger less than medium. If they don’t ask, it’s a fair assumption I don’t want it any less than well done.

    What you can do is buy your own slab of meat, like a chuck roast, sear it on all sides, then grind it up at home. You can do this ahead of time, and even freeze the resulting ground beef if you don’t need it all right away.

    Not only do you not need to worry about surface contamination, but there’s less worry cross-contamination on the grinder. How well did the butcher clean that grinder after they made the ground pork before they made your ground beef?

    Rare burgers taste better, and it’s worth the trouble. You also know that your burger is all meat and no scraps, which tastes better even if you still want it well done.

  37. #14 – Because as soon as they ask, I no longer completely trust that they know how to safely prepare the meat that’s about to hit my plate.

  38. #11: Getting hit by lighting and getting run over aren’t the totally predictable result of industry corner-cutting, worker mistreatment, corporations trumping civil liberties, and industry regulatory failures that we see here.

    Some of us recall the American response to mad cow (BSE cow inspection was decreased probably at the behest of agribusiness), how in 2003 Japan (rightly) refused American meat for a couple of years after a US veal shipment came with a vertebral column in it, and other such problems including Texas cattle ranchers challenging our freedom of speech with bogus libel claims (that few other than Oprah Winfrey would have the resources to adequately defend).

  39. @15
    “anyone who offers rare burgers is an idiot”

    Plenty of restaurants serve rare burgers safely because they don’t buy this malignant megacorp mystery meat. Some places actually give a shit about the quality of their food, you know.

  40. @26- IAmInnocent- If you’re saying the stuff was unhealthy per se, that’s a bit of a different notion than the one the article was making. The consequences of the E. coli are a freak chance.

    @27 Jhahn- And steak tartare or beef carpaccio is so darn tasty, too. I’ll take the burger medium well at a minimum, though. Mainly a texture issue with ground (versus chopped) beef.

  41. I eat rare hamburgers, steak tartare, carpaccio. You go to your butcher, select the meat and have him grind it for you. If you’re going to eat mystery meat, of course you’re taking a risk. You wouldn’t eat random raw fish and call it sashimi.

    Poultry, of course, is terrifying in any scenario.

  42. @39 JB- Enough people go outside, some will get hit by lightning. Enough people cross the street some will get run over. Totally predictable some will happen, even if they’re low-probability. And if you eat of the cow, you’re going to get some cases of cow-related diseases.

    How important is it to you to, say, halve your risk of being hit by lightning? Halve your risk of getting a bad strain of E. coli?

  43. At the very least, meat production is an inefficient use of resources. More than 70 percent of the grains and half the water consumed in this country are used for livestock.

  44. Reminds me of the incident a couple years ago when a farm wanted to test 100% of their meat for mad cow disease and was prevented by the USDA because other producers complained that people might expect them to test as well.

    We are members of a local Community Sponsored Agriculture farm. Lots of great veggies (though the tomato blight hit hard this year), and through that connection now get our meat through a local sustainable, humane livestock farm; fruit and apples from a local orchard and other good stuff.

    The cost is slightly more that we’d pay at the local mega-supermarket, but the stuff tastes better, it’s educational to see where food actually comes from (they have various programs for city kids and such), we’ve been introduced to things we’d never have tried before, and we’re more in touch with the seasonal aspect of eating.

    We also like that the farm contributes to local food banks.

    I remember as a kid when the store would first get plums or peaches each year. Now you can get just about anything any time of the year. Of course it’s picked green, shipped half way around the world, and tastes mediocre at best.

  46. @Anonymous 15
    Good question. Normally, the bacterium in question, E. coli O157:H7, just causes bloody diarrhea and perhaps kidney failure in extreme cases. But the bacterium causes cell death through the production of Shiga toxins — maybe the infection happened to kill some important nerve cells or something in this case.

  47. I am a vegetarian. I almost died from a parasite I caught off of food I thought was properly prepared (yes, a nasty, tropical parasite, caught in Brooklyn). You can also get E coli from fruits and vegetables (um, what do you think night soil is?). It all depends on how your food is prepared and who does that preparation (including picking).

    Wash your foods thoroughly. IF you eat meat, be careful of the source. If you eat ground meat, grind it yourself. It is the surface of meat that gets this kind of bacteria.

  48. #25

    “The nerve of those restaurants that give a damn what their customers want! Do you get bugged when they ask you what side dishes you’d like, too?”

    That’s a pretty lame argument. If I wanted to eat raw chicken when I know that over 50% of raw chickens in New Zealand harbour samonella, should I be able to do so for the sake of “choice”?

    It’s a public health issue.

  49. @48- Yes, actually, I’d say you should. After all, they don’t require the chicken to be cooked before you walk out of the grocery store with it, do they? Arguably, it’d be more inconvenient to have someone else serve you some.

    Your body, you can ruin it if you’d like. In far more interesting ways than some raw cluck-cluck.

  50. As the article pointed out, cooking ground beef thoroughly is not sufficient. A cutting board washed with soap can remain contaminated and can contaminate a towel used to dry it. Anything used with contaminated meat has to be STERILIZED with bleach or sufficient heat. Although the person cooking the patty discussed in the article made some mistake, it was not necessarily the obvious one of undercooking the meat. I don’t think salmonella and most of the other food-born pathogens are nearly as likely to cause illness through a small exposure. E. coli O157:H7 seems to be just particularly bad stuff.

  51. Irradiating food will cause you to turn into a GIANT MONSTER!!! I knows, I saws some of those 50’s documentaries on it!!1!!!

    Wait, what? Those weren’t documentaries?

  52. Thanks for the comment on the Shiga toxins. The follow up to that line of reasoning is that the toxins that the bacteria create don’t die when the bacteria do. They just stop doing the business of being alive and consuming material to live and producing waste. All that waste is still there no matter how well you cook a burger. It’s just the critters that make it that stop ticking.

  53. @48, So supermarkets should only serve chickens that’ve been cooked to an internal temperature of 75c for 5 minutes? God forbid someone actually gets to cook food how they want to eat it. I’d be happy to bet that most people get salmonella from screwing up during preparation, rather than undercooking then eating chicken.

    However, restaurants have a right to protect themselves, so I wouldn’t expect most so serve chicken cooked in a way that wouldn’t kill salmonella.

    Sure, I probably wouldn’t eat a supermarket Chicken raw, but I’d have no issues with a properly prepared Chicken sashimi.

  55. Yuck!

    This is why I refuse to eat hamburger meat unless it is free-range, local, and organic. Big corporate meat companies put out such disgusting low quality meat.

    Sure, the meat I eat is more expensive, so I don’t eat as many hamburgers as the average American. But, that’s also a good thing. Better to eat less and have high quality food.

  57. @Shecky:

    The problem I have with big businesses (such as Cargill) is that the way in which they process their food makes it so much easier for contamination to spread, and over a great distance. Huge processing plants, gigantic volumes of meat… something’s going to be missed, and someone’s going to mess up. The meat in this woman’s burger was from freakin’ everywhere, it seems; a situation like that can make food-borne illness much harder to track. Where else did this particular strain of E. coli wander off to via the well-spread out meat sources?

    Of course Cargill doesn’t want to make people sick. That doesn’t mean they’re actually capable of keeping people from getting sick. I’m guessing the QC (Quality Control) procedures they’d need in every facility to keep this from happening again are so expensive (in their business model) as to be prohibitive to them being implemented as policy. Thus, they’ll do the bare-bones required by law, which probably isn’t always enough. Smaller units are much easier to keep track of and clean up, by virtue of them being less to watch over.

    I’d trust a smaller, independent shop over a larger one simply because they probably had to get their meat in one shipment from one source at a time. It’s more likely that the ground beef at a small shop is made up of one animal, especially if you’re getting it ground yourself. If not one animal, it’s at least from a few animals raised the same way in the same area. One could also hope that a small, independent shop wouldn’t want to get meat from large processing plants in the first place, choosing instead to support local farmers, many of whom will sell at the farm-gate level directly to whomever wants the meat. Get it processed yourself by a local butcher and feel good about your food!

    The same rules apply to mass-produced veggies. Large volumes mean more chance to screw it all up. I buy from farmer’s markets all summer long, and enjoy knowing that I’m supporting a local or community farm.

    This all being said, I agree that I’d like to do some research to confirm that large-scale processing produces more e. coli deaths than small-sourced meat. After my Quality Control and Microbiology education, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if large-scale was ultimately condemned, despite providing large amounts of cheap meat.

  58. @Xeni #45, I don’t know where jimkirk is, but here in the Atlanta area I’m part of a great CSA that offers organic local produce, eggs, some dairy products, and meats. Because of the warmer climate, this CSA is year round (many northern ones stop growing in the winter, as it’s hard to get crops from frozen ground!). Anyone interested can look for a similar program in their area here: http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

  59. Three things occur to me after reading this article:

    1) The quantities of food production this article discusses are astounding. The amount of food product that must be produced daily to keep a population our size alive is frightening in it’s scale. It’s no wonder they are so loosely regulated. The government knows that major interruptions in the food chain will have large scale consequences. It seems to me that, in the event of any large scale disaster that would interrupt supply chains, starvation is the main danger.

    2) All the talk about the death of the news industry and the actual monetary value of real reporting should look at this article. This is solid, hard reporting of an industry that despises close inspection. The article is full if revelatory facts discerned from hard work. While it’s great to have blogs like BB pick up these stories and forward them so they reach my awareness, it should also be noted that this level of reporting is worth money.

    3) Although I am sure there are also dangers I am unaware of, grinding one’s own meat in a food processor is relatively trouble free and one can choose exactly which cuts to use. Personally, I like a mix of beef and pork cuts which make an excellent burger.

  60. I find it interesting (and rather short-sighted, really) that not one comment has addressed the omst threatening aspect of megacorp-processed foods: The impact of one error. The E. coli spinach scare of 2006? The affected area was 26 US states and Canada. The recall affected *28* brands.

    The company in question supplies 74% of all US grocery stores.

    Don’t forget that all of these bags of spinach were pre-washed, in a chlorine solution, which was supposed to render them safe from any contamination. The washing didn’t do the trick, and the result was massive upheaval and long delays while the FDA hunted down the source of the contamination.

    I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the comparative advantages of the economies of scale. I’ll also point to another area that, if you really think it through, will keep you up at night: Post-pasteurization (or -irradiation) contamination.

    Bon appetit.

  61. Your butcher should have some motivation for doing what they do. Look for that motivation and you’re more likely to find a healthy and honest food source. By motivation, I mean religion (Kosher, Halal) or old-fashioned pride in their craft.

    Also, the description of how Cargill makes pre-formed burger patties is nasty. It reminds me of the “loose meat” butchers used to sell from time to time in the old days. Diners often bought it and sold it, honestly enough, as “loose meat sandwiches.”

    Nowadays, a loose meat sandwich is pretty good, if you like Sloppy Joes. But in the old days, they were made from whatever little odds & ends the butcher ended up with after reducing his stock to steaks, ribs and so on.

  62. Just a note: Even in Manhattan, you can get chuck steak for $1.99 per pound. A old cast iron meat grinder cost me $15 at a fleamarket. If nothing else, I know that my burgers are single-source.

  63. Solutions:

    * Go to a real butcher.
    * Buy whole cuts of meat and have the butcher grind it for you.
    * Or, buy meat ground on-site.
    * Don’t get spaced out on organic foods claims or sausage fears: bacteria is bacteria and it’s in whatever you’re eating. See ‘organic beef no safer than alternative’
    * USE A PANADE when making well-done burgers; one recipe is:

    1 slice white bread
    2 tablespoons whole milk
    3/4 teaspoon salt
    3/4 teaspoon pepper
    1 medium clove garlic
    2 teaspoons steak sauce
    1 1/2 pounds 80 percent lean ground chuck

  64. @62: Remember that it was a waste retention pond from a large scale dairy operation near the spinach farm that contaminated the fields? Yeah, you forgot to mention that because it destroys your argument.

    Less animal product consumption == a happier, healther everything.

  65. @Shecky

    The point of getting meat from a local butcher is the fact that it has been handled less, shipped around less, and of course, is not filled with ‘fillers’ (hopefully).

    It might not be practically for a lot of people to buy half cows or whole cows, but it’s honestly the best and cheaper route to go. You know where your food came from, you know what it ate, and you know where it was chopped up and processed. Enough said.

  66. I remember driving my muscle car into Chelsea Massachusetts to visit a friend. We went to a neighborhood restaurant for burgers. The restauranteur sat us in the back of his kitchen where he could talk with us while he worked, my friend being a youth from the neighborhood and all.

    He made us the burgers himself, no charge. First he ground the beef, with a grinder, and with meat from the same cuts, that came from the neighborhood butcher, who made the cuts from the same side that probably came from a cow grown in Eastern Massachusetts or Southern New Hampshire.

    I believe at that time McDonald’s had not yet started using hyper-cow meat from Brazilian ranches that are cut out of jungles which, btw, once removed big tonnage of CO2 from the air but now are retuning it to the air as the slash from deforestation rots.

    Times sure have changed. I won’t eat burgers any more unless locally ground with local, organically fed cattle. Surprisingly, such burgers only cost about 20% more around here than hyper-cow burgers at equivalent eateries. But there are only two places in my town (not counting the organic butcher shop that will actually make you one).

    So sorry for the young woman.

    Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation only skimmed the surface.

  68. Do you know how beef gets the USDA seal of approval? A guy with a clipboard stands about 100ft back from the slaughterhouse happenings and makes little “checks”..there is no up close analysis and oversight.

    Here’s the thing. I’m all for a free market and capitalism but large corporations like this give it a bad name, because they simply lack the foresight or are incapable of understanding enlightened self-interest. Right now the fucking $ is what is driving them, but then you have shit like this happen to an innocent and they’ll get sued for millions I’m sure (hope).

    Because, if they operated from the position of enlightened self-interest, they would understand its WORTH their time to offer meat from a “clean” source and ensure that a high quality product is arriving at your table, that the $ isn’t worth it when the statistical odds like this increase and would eat away at any supposed profit made in the short run.

    It’s a situation where everyone wins yet unfortunately people are too greedy and short sighted to care..

  69. “It is a sad fact of life, Don, but the truth is we all have to eat a little shit from time to time”

  70. As tragic as this story is, it’s essentially a one-off. “Ten thousand” cases of e. coli per year sounds like a lot, but it’s statistically negligible – especially when you consider that ground beef only makes up a fraction of that number. Americans eat 15-45 billion burgers per year (depending on who you ask). Even using the worst-case numbers, you have significantly less than 0.0000006% chance of getting sick from eating a random burger. Even then, your chances of suffering anything worse than a bad case of the runs is very low. If you only eat well-done burgers, the chance drops to effectively zero.

    Tainted beef is just like child predators and terrorism. People are so blinded by the occasional horror story that they fail to realize that incidences are incredibly rare. What’s more, any action taken to lower the already-low occurrence rate will be at best expensive, and at worst harmful. And no matter what you do, you can never completely eliminate the problem.

    1. “CDC estimates that 76 million Americans get sick, more than 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 people die from foodborne illnesses each year.”

  71. Just FYI: There are an ENORMOUS number of e.coli deaths from fast-food beef every year, and the fast food industry has done a VERY good job of making sure information about these deaths never reaches the public; thus far, every single settlement has included language preventing the parents (almost 2/3 of the deaths are among children) and other family of the deceased from talking about the case or disclosing cause of death; they’ve gone so far as to, with court orders, keep hospitals from releasing the cause of death, even when you’d assume the CDC would require that disclosure.

    If you feed fast food beef to your children, you are putting them in a very grave danger.

    Of course, I have to submit this anonymously; I could lose my job just for talking about this, even though it’s not new news for anyone who has seen Food Inc. or read much on the subject.

  73. That’s why me? i make my own burger and cook my own patty. We should be cautious enough its our health that bets in here.

  74. This is a tragic story (That POOR girl!) but anyone who finds this surprising hasn’t been paying any attention. Big Beef has been forced to recall millions of pounds of beef several times in the past few years. Don’t you wonder why? And if you think the USDA is there to protect you, you should know something about their conflicting dual mandate: protecting consumers and promoting business. I’m not saying that there aren’t any good inspectors or good people working for Big Food. But the system we have is broken and as a consumer you need to take the time to care about and know where your food comes from and how it’s being made. And if you don’t think you have enough time to do so, stop watching TV!

  78. people need to stop relying on fast food as an easy meal idea. Hasn’t anybody seen Fast Food Nation or Super Size Me? I’m not blaming this woman for eating the burger though, fast food is very tasty. Although I could never work for a fast food corporation even if i was offered big bucks. I have ethics.

  79. #76, without something to back up what you say, you’re going to be ignored as an internet crazy person. Anonymous – no references – grand conspiracy? Bah.

  81. cicada comment 21 “If it makes you feel better, I’d probably try a good filet o’ longpork were it offered.” –With a side order of Kuru?

  82. I love seeing #76 (anonymous paranoid rant about “enormous” number of deaths) directly after #75 (sensible discussion about the amount of burgers actually consumed in America compared to the amount of E-coli cases, which of course are not all from burgers).

    It makes #76 all the more deliciously ridiculous looking. Go Internet Crazy People, I’ve got popcorn!

  83. I did some reading after the Ralph Klein “Shoot, shovel and shut up” mad cow incident. In terms of health risks from red meat, even given the current state of food safety, vCJD << HO157 << heart disease. So yes, avoiding meat is good for you, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. I didn't eat any red meat for a couple years, and even now treat a fast food burger as a tasty, risky treat, kind of like smoking a cigarette.

  85. An awesome movie is “Food Inc.”, just saw it last week. It not only covers food production in the USA, which will stand your hair on end, but offers alternatives for people who want to take control of their diet and health.
    A very interesting point is made about how American subsidized corn, dumped on Mexico (thanks to NAFTA), contributes to the inflow of undocumented workers into the United States; many of whom wind up working in slaughterhouses under appalling conditions that affect not only them, but contribute to the contaminated products that ruined the health of this young woman. Also these food conglomerates have to be reined in, but don’t look to Congress to do it without a huge uproar from the public. Money corrupts and all that.
    The film starts out with a clever title sequence for you design mavens. A little like “Napoleon Dynamite”, come to think of it.

  86. Bah, cook your ground beef proper, people. You’re not cooking a steak here – and if you’re topping it with with condiments and cheese and whatnot anyway who cares.

    Want to ensure they’re juicy even if cooked through? Put a small cube of butter in the middle of the patty and form the meat around it. It melts and seeps out through the burger while you’re bbq’n and makes just about the tastiest burger in the universe.

  87. Once you understand the USDA goal is not food safety, why be surprised: Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.

  89. Re read your copy of The Jungle, SSDC (Same sht, different century)

    Pretty much the same 100 years later. Meat packing plants hire illegal unskilled labor, meat packing plants use fillers and ruminants to make the meat cheaper, plants use chemicals and dyes to make the meat look and smell fresher longer, animals kept in hellacious conditions, politicians paid to look the other way, people get sick, the illegals get deported, a big to do is made about cleaning up the industry, everyone feels better, things return to status quo.

    Sadly everytime this happens, we all throw up our hands shake our fists at the big evil companies and a few weeks later we go back to what we were doing before it was brought to our attention that we are mushrooms. The companies rely on us to stay true to type.

  91. Please don’t pretend it’s the big bad meat eaters that disrupt complex inter-related ecosystems.

    The Great Plains weren’t created so self-righteous vegans could carpet them with cereal monocultures. Every time you eat rice, wheat or corn you support titanic environmental damage far more than I do eating bison and deer.

    All human agriculture is environmentally destructive. All of it, no matter how organic, tie-dyed, or chick-grinder free. When it’s not destructive, it’s not called agriculture, it’s called “gathering” (as in “hunting and gathering”, the ecological niche humans used to fill before we overpopulated it).

    I respect the ethical choice behind vegetarianism/veganism, even though I don’t share the ethos behind it. But I can’t muster anything but ridicule for “environmentalist” arguments against meat eating. Sorry.

  92. As others have pointed out eating vegetarian is hardly a guarantee against food-borne E. Coli. Many of the agribusiness practices that make meat less safe to eat also affect, say, spinach.

    And to all those who think it should be illegal for me to order a medium rare burger: get your mitts off my meat. I’m all for improving farming practices, but if I want to take a calculated risk by biting into a bloodied burger at a reputable restaurant then that should be my own damn business.

  93. @ Ito #91:

    Every time you eat rice, wheat or corn you support titanic environmental damage far more than I do eating bison and deer.

    You hunt wild bison?

  94. I haven’t read this book, but I have heard the author speak on a couple of occasions:

    http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDying-Hamburger-Processing-Epidemic-Alzheimers%2Fdp%2F031234015X&ei=dxTKSq6oHM2GlAeu7KiSAw&usg=AFQjCNGhJNqXnzrc1J05qXQ7lw7Wmtwfkw

    His argument goes way beyond the E Coli threat, focussing on what he believes are the prions that exist in cattle, and for which ground beef is an ideal system for mass distribution. Where prions would normally be contained to a single cow, and usually to the spinal cord, massive slaughterhouse facilities act to both aggregate more cattle into the mix of ground beef, but also make cost-effective the harvesting of far more of the material close to the spine using automated deboning tools, adding far more spinal material in the process. All of this is subject to ‘tolerable’ limits, but the accumulation of small amounts, and the very high toxicity of this material is the big problem.

    His final diagnosis is that the epidemic of Alzheimer’s is the result of this accumulation of prions, which are linked to Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease. The effects of the accumulation of this material are not felt for decades.

    His conclusions are bound to be contentious, since they threaten the livelihood of very large corporations like Cargill, who would of course oppose his conclusion were they right or wrong. I can’t say anything about the validity of his science. But conclusions aside, his descriptions of the modern meat industry are eye-opening: a few people here with ideas that hamburger comes from their butcher should read it. And before anyone gets all flamey, yes I know about local butchers and organic meats, etc etc., but that is really a swimming pool next to the ocean when it comes to the relative importance it has to this issue.

  95. Ho, I certainly wish I could hunt bison. But their native environment has been destroyed by agriculture, beef cattle, and industrialization. I don’t know of any huntable herds (outside specialty hunting camps); there are certainly none in my area.

    It’s getting easier to get bison meat, though. We see it in the local supermarket as well as in local butcher shops. A local place that delivers is the Colvine farm: http://www.delawarebison.com/

    We eat bison burgers and bison beer chili pretty frequently. Venison less often. Bison tastes more like beef than venison does.

  96. Sounds like many people think this is just a matter of cooking meat properly … sounds a little more complicated than that. If you read the article you might notice the meat itself originates from as far away as S America (plus the US) – all the dirty little cheap chunks get sent and ground up into a new burger. Sounds like the only accountability going on is in the hands of the distributors – the article mentions that Coscto is one of the few stores that insists on certain standards for the meat it sells and as a result big companies like Tyson won’t sell to them. All this = more than just an undercooked patty.

  97. ito, the great plains monocultures exist to produce food to feed cows. the largest crop, corn, is all feed corn and inedible.

    the environmental argument against meat eating is a pretty simple google search away and pretty simple to understand. basically its costs way more environmentally to get a pound of meat than a pound of grain (or soy). there are no toxic feedlots to deal with either, and recent studies have shown that the greenhouse gases produced via animal husbandry is more than the world’s vehicle fleet. modern, factory farmed meat is an environmental disaster.

    good for you though, eating deer and bison.

  98. @ Ito #95:

    That’s where I get my bison too, but the reason I asked was that if the bison you eat wasn’t roaming wild then it was probably fed from farmland that might have otherwise been used to grow wheat or corn for humans. Thus your statement “Every time you eat rice, wheat or corn you support titanic environmental damage far more than I do eating bison and deer” was a downright silly thing to say.

    I’m not anti-meat, but I think both sides owe it to each other to use honest arguments.

  99. @ Omnivore #94:

    That’s an interesting theory, but it seems to me that if there’s any validity to it would be a simple matter to just compare Alzheimer’s rates among elderly meat-eaters to that of elderly vegetarians.

  100. @xeni, while it’s possible to eat more healthfully on a budget by buying bulk grains and beans and fresh fruits and veggies, it’s hard to do if local stores don’t sell those ingredients. Many poor neighborhoods are so-called “food deserts” with corner groceries selling limited, poor quality yet expensive produce, no bulk grains, and mostly processed foods.

    A middle-class Berkeley couple tried living on a food stamp budget for a week, with the added restriction of eating healthily. Not easy, even with shopping at the Berkeley Bowl, using brownie samples for dessert and dumpster diving for bread. http://www.foodstamped.com/

  101. My wife and I just recently started buying our beef from a friend of a friend who owns a farm and slaughter only one or two cow a year. There’s about 3 or 4 families who get contacted when it’s time and we place our orders. $900 bought us 300 lbs of beef last time. Don’t think we’ll ever buy store bought beef again. Tastes better, and we know and trust the source.

  102. We often gauge our reactions to catastrophe by our proximity to ground zero. In the case of Stephanie Smith, while being sickened by her ordeal with a tainted hamburger, we silently thank God that most of us live about 1500 miles from Nebraska. Opon closer inspection, however, we find that Cargil produces hamburger patties for McDonalds. How near is the closest McDonalds to you, or to your children?

  103. @97 Your post is so disingenuous as to border on the dishonest. What do you think they feed the cattle on? Cereal mono cultures. As well as of course in many cases processed bits of their ancestors, thus concentrating the hormones, prions and bacteria.

    It’s a very simple equation, for each transfer up the food chain there’s waste and inefficiency. You can feed an awful lot more people with grain than cattle for a given acreage of land. You knew this didn’t you, go on – be brave and admit it ;-)

    I’m not into proselytizing really, but let’s a call a spade an engineered earth moving device when we see one.

  104. The point I take from the article is not that I should just cook my meat properly or even that I should avoid meat. It’s that I don’t trust Cargill or any giant faceless organization to have my best dietary interests in mind when they go to turn a profit. Food is supposed to be grown, not manufactured.

  105. @remez, not arguing that reality at all — or the reality that the least healthy foods seem marketed most aggressively to the poor. I am already aware of that website, and of how unfairly skewed the system is.

    Just addressing one commenter’s implication that healthy has to be expensive. There’s an economic realm between “food stamp dependent” and “eats at Nobu 5 nights a week” in which frugal but healthy eating is possible. My comment was intended to point at how that can happen.

  107. From religious food doctrine, to diet fads of the last three centuries, to the now trendy local/organic debate, it seems that food consumption is one area where very smart, very reasonable people allow themselves, again and again, to subscribe to peer-propagated, faith-based logic. I think this might be one of those evolutionary blind spots in our motherboards – a subject which we are just incapable of thinking about without strong social prejudice. (Myself included, of course.)

    “But Big Meat poisoned you and 10,000 other people.” If Big Meat is feeding 1 billion people, and gets 10,000 sick in one year, that is actually 4x safer than a hypothetical local farmer-butcher who feeds everyone in a town of 25,000 and only gets 1 person sick in the same year. What i mean is, it’s not question of numbers, but of scale.

    Or: yes, it’s nice to know your local farmer and butcher, and you are willing to vouch for their food safety; does this mean you are willing to vouch for the food safety of the army of farmers and butchers it would take to equal the food production of Big Beef? How?

    I think the only way to answer these questions would be by comparing a Fatality-per-bite-served statistic between Cargill and Joe the Butcher and Jill the Butcher and Ahmed the Halal Butcher, etc. Antinous, Shecky, Chip and others have posted good figures (thanks guys!) but not enough data for me to say which side produces food more safely, IMO. (As for which parts of the cow wind up in my burger, I’m with Cicada in thinking that the “ick” factor is mostly cultural, not logical. I like a nice tongue burrito, and the gf just introduced me to fresh grilled mollejas, yum!)

    Very sad for Stephanie Smith and family. Sorry to see so much blame-the-victim logic in this thread, but I think that’s just a reaction to the blame-the corporation tone of the original article.

    Finally: being car-free, I find that I am increasingly unwilling to listen to food health, safety, morality, or sustainability arguments from anyone who practices some form of food cultism, but owns a car. Just sayin’.

  109. @102

    While I’m sure the habits of Big Meat are responsible for there being a higher risk is mass produced patties, the only reason this girl is sick is because the patty wasn’t properly cooked.

    Blaming the megacorp for it is like suing ford because you got hit by a drunk driver.

    Sure, they made the 2 tonnes of steel that did you harm, but they never intended it to be used by a drunken idiot.

    Same with the meat, they supplied it with (I’m guessing) explicit instructions on how to cook it, ensure it’s cooked through and not to eat it if it’s still cold in the middle. It’s not the megacorp’s fault if a stoner decides frozen patties are for chewing on, or someone serves an unsafely cooked burger to their kid.

  110. @115

    It clearly says in the article that cooking meat properly (fully cooked) doesn’t guarantee that it is safe to eat.

    Our system is set up to fail- sourcing from dozens of food lots for every burger makes it virtually impossible to ensure a healthy piece of “meat” every time (given our current food laws and enforcement).

  111. Berk #115:

    …the only reason this girl is sick is because the patty wasn’t properly cooked.

    Clearly that’s not the ONLY reason she got sick, it was just the final factor in a sequence of events leading to her illness. A more honest and accurate statement would be “this woman probably wouldn’t be sick if the meat had been cooked properly.”

  112. The meat industry in America is fine. We ship beef and pork all over the world, particularly to Japan and China. Most ground beef you get is from whole muscle trimmings that are ground on site and sold fresh. The realy cheap frozen patties are the ones I question, other than that, there isn’t a problem.

  113. I am sorry, when did I advocate feedlots? I don’t remember doing so.

    Cereal monocultures do not exist solely to provide cattle fodder, and there’s a bread aisle and 30 to 40 thousand pounds of corn syrup in your local mega-mart to prove it. You haven’t made a valid argument that vegetarianism is “better for the earth” – all you’ve done is prove that we can support far more humans if we destroy all the animal habitat in order to raise vegetables for human consumption.

    Humans expand to fill their environment, so you wouldn’t magically create more unspoiled Earth if you switched to eating cow food instead of cows, you’d just create more vegetarian babies and fewer cows.

  114. Ito- I’m kind of on your side here, but that earlier comment about grain-eaters doing more damage to the environment than meat-eaters is just too ridiculous.

    Obviously you can harm the environment through farming practices that don’t involve livestock, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is no way to get more food out of an animal than you put into it. Admitting this will make you look like a more reasonable debater.

  115. @116, I didn’t read the article particularly critically.

    However, I’m pretty sure cooking your mystery meat to 71c (higher if you’re paranoid) for a few minutes is nigh guaranteed to leave e.coli and other nasties dead. However cooking until brown and hot doesn’t guarantee anything.

    I’m sure you could argue about most people not owning a thermometer, but it’s one of those little precautions that stops so much badness.

    @117, fair point.

  116. A great book is “Mad Cow USA” that I read during the mad cow scare.

    A few things
    1) This strain of E. coli is not killed by heat, just like the prions that cause mad cow can’t be killed by heat.
    2) Little known story. A big food manufacturer cut a deal with the USDA so that they didn’t have to release the names of companies where tainted food was shipped. That info is “proprietary”. So when they shipped a cow that had mad cow to California the media could not get the information about where it was sent. Why not? Because it might hurt the business of both the corporation sending it and the companies buying it.

    The public did NOT have a right to know where the tainted cow was going. Public health was not as important as the corp profits that a food scare would have.

    Because of this a Vietnamese restaurant in Truckee California served mad cow meat to their diners. (that is just the one I found out about, there are others)

    And you think THIS is bad? Guess who gets the meat that is rejected? Our pets!

    In 2007 over 4,000 dogs and cats died because of the melamine tainted food that they ate. Over twice as many will have long term kidney problems.

    Ever wonder what happened to that tainted pet food? Sold to Big Chicken and Big Pig. 20 million chickens and 56,000 hogs ate the same food that killed our dogs and cats.

    The FDA would not reveal to the press the name of the food processors that fed this tainted food to the chickens and pigs. It was “proprietary” information and since they threw together a document that said it would be so diluted by the time humans ate it the USDA gave the food the stamp of approval.

    Did people die eating it? We don’t know because as a scientist from the Union of Concerned scientist pointed out to me the symptoms of kidney problems would show up in people who already had problems so it would be hard to trace it back.

    Sen. Dick Durbin tried to over haul the food safety system but it was shot down by lobbyists.
    I told his legislative aide that it won’t be until we had at least 3 famous children of rich politicians and 1 movie star die until we get some change.

  117. I realize that I jumped to unsafe pet food that was unrelated to meat in the post above. The protein that comes from animals that go into dog food come from rendering plants. The things that go into the pot to be rendered are really sad.

    Melamine was added to wheat gluten in China to show a higher protein percentage than the gluten actually had.

    Later, in China, this melamine was added to baby formula resulting in baby deaths.

  118. Patty not properly cooked? We don’t know that. There’s a video at the NYT website re an experiment in following hamburger package instructions meticulously, using a batch of hamburger innoculated with a mild strain of e coli. After the burgers were cooked, the burgers and the kitched were tested for e coli. The burgers had been cooked till they were safe, but the sink in which the researchers washed their hands was contaminated, as was the kitchen towel. The e coli on the meat can infect the kitchen unless you use operating-room sterile procedures.

    Re Xeni’s comment: “It is possible to eat frugally, healthily, and inexpensively (I’m thinking: simple, nonpackaged foods, much less meat, much more plant-based foods, bulk grains and beans and fresh fruits and veggies).”

    Living high on the hog there, lady. I’m unemployed, wretchedly poor, and I’m waiting for my first food stamp interview. I can’t afford most fruits and vegetables. I’m eating brown rice, beans, and cabbage.

    1. Decent meat is cheaper than decent fruits and vegetables unless you’re willing to live on bananas and potatoes.

  119. People, go out and rent “Fast Food Nation”, the drama/documentary based on the book of the same name.
    Even better: read the book.

    My favorite line is “There is shit in the meat”.

    It will make you cut down your meat consumption I guarantee it.

  120. Brainspore, I admit that I am not interested in looking like a reasonable debater, I have a Vramin-like attitude to Internet posting.

    I hope you will read this earlier post, though:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/01/baby-chicks-ground-u.html#comment-590105

    Animals (such as pigs and cows) eat things I cannot (such as acorns and grass) and I eat the animals. The stuff I can’t eat was nearly all extracted from the air – plants take very little from the earth, just a few trace elements if you don’t count the water. So, I don’t have to admit that there is no way to get more food out of an animal than I put into it, because that’s not really true. Pigs and squirrels can eat stuff that is not food for humans. An oak forest is phenomenally more environmentally sound than a farm, and I can feed my family with either one. Trees can grow on land that will not support human food crops without chemical fertilizers, but people knock down mature forests and start farms and fuel the whole thing on irreplaceable petrochemicals.

    But that’s all just sophistry (the art of installing soffits). The damage that humans are doing to the environment is because we have too many humans. Nature will correct this problem, but I’d kind of like the species to survive, at least where my own friends and family are concerned.

    I must be off, G’night all!

  121. @Spocko

    This strain of E. coli is not killed by heat, just like the prions

    This is not true.

    Prions are malformed proteins, and are not actually alive to begin with, and so cannot be killed.

    E-Coli, including E. coli O157:H7 are bacteria and can be killed by heat.

    From Purdue University
    http://www.ces.purdue.edu/extmedia/FS/FS-9/FS-9.pdf

    “There are several recommendations for
    reducing the risk of E. coli O157:H7 in food.

    • Cook all ground beef thoroughly. Ground
    beef should be cooked until the thickest part
    of the patty reaches at least 160F that cause mad cow can’t be killed by heat.”

    The toxin produced by these bugs, Shiga-like toxin (SLT), or Vero toxin is not affected by heat, however, which is why it is important to keep food refrigerated to prevent the bacteria from multiplying and producing dangerous amounts of the toxin prior to cooking.

  122. @danlalan,
    Pardon me for being inaccurate. It is the toxins and the malformed proteins that can’t be killed by heat.

    In a somewhat related note, since you brought up Purdue and food safety you might be interested to know that a some folks Indiana State Poultry Association and Purdue University were directly involved in covering up for the Chicken Manufacturer that fed the tainted pet food to 20,000,000 chickens. I turned all my evidence of this over to the reporters from the LA Times and USA Today who were covering the pet food crisis.

    http://www.spockosbrain.com/2007/05/question-for-dr-kenneth-petersen-whose

    http://www.spockosbrain.com/2007/05/is-it-safe-yet-super-chicken-edition

  124. @43: The number of people killed by lightning each year is under 100. The number of people who are harmed or killed by foodborne illnesses each year is far greater (which one of the moderators in this thread has said “CDC estimates that 76 million Americans get sick, more than 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 people die from foodborne illnesses each year.”). You use the same language (“some”) to make readers think these things are roughly equal. You have yet to post actual figures. If the percentage of foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths due to meat are a quarter of the figures Antinous posted, that means you believe that it is fair and reasonable to compare under 100 people per year being hit by lightning with figures at least an order of magnitude greater (non-fatalities are multiple orders of magnitude apart).

    How important is it to you to, say, halve your risk of being hit by lightning? Halve your risk of getting a bad strain of E. coli?

    It’s worth enough to me to not be disingenuous. It’s worth enough to me to attempt to understand the larger issues going on here without distracting people away from known and fixable harm by human-created processes. It’s worth enough to me to realize this thread has likely attracted some meat industry sympathizers who aren’t to be taken seriously.

  125. News flash:
    Blaming the mother doesn’t change the fact that a woman is paralyzed from eating a nasty product from a company with a history of doing all kinds of shit to avoid scrutiny of their business practices.

    Irradiating or overcooking a slurry of crap meat not only doesn’t take the feces out, it may not always kill the stuff in the poop that might kill YOU.

    Being a vegetarian will not help you if you are buying produce from corporations that operate like most large food corporations do. You can get just as sick from a salad as you can from a poopburger.

    And yes, you CAN get sick from eating locally grown and organic food. But it’s highly unlikely that that sickness will spread to 26 states in 48 hours. And it’s also plausible to assume that your local food will be offered with more care and pride by the local producer.

    Anyway, it seems like good, basic common sense to question where our food is coming from, and how it’s produced.

    Dontcha think?

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