Saturday, September 5, 2015

Beef and poop, an American story


Your burger can bite you.

Try not to think about ordering your burger “rare.”

Here’s the sad but true backstory: the folks at Consumer Reports visited 103 stores in 26 cities and bought 458 pounds of ground beef. Pound by pound, they tested the raw meat for contamination.

“All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that signified fecal contamination” is the finding reported by The New York Times Daily Digest.

Ground beef storage unit

Try saying it this way: all of the meat had vestigial poop in it. Salmonella was detected in 1 per cent of the samples.

The Department of Agriculture interpreted the report as “good news” because no bad E. coli had been found. The North American Meat Institute pointed out that the occurrences of bacteria were “far below U. S. D. A performance standards.”

Note that the federal standard is that it’s OK to have salmonella in up to 7.5 percent of meat samples. I guess the folks at Agriculture are happily convinced that every consumer handles raw meat in sterile conditions from start to finish, and fully cooks all portions of meat before the kids or Gramma eat anything.

You should fully cook beef to at least 160 degrees.

Or don’t eat ground beef.

Turkey burgers are pretty good. I like to toast my bun.







Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

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