Welcome to The Jungle

The more things change, the more they stay the same, or so Upton Sinclair would likely say were he still alive.

Mrs. Hommes thinks I am crazy for buying more expensive cuts of beef in order to grind my own meat at home to make hamburgers. Perhaps, but my defense is pretty straightforward: It's more fun, I don't eat burgers often enough for the extra cost to become an issue, the burgers taste better when the exact cuts and meat:fat ratios can be controlled, and most importantly, I don't have to eat the ammonia treated and e. coli tainted ground beef that corporate agribusiness produces:

Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus…

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…

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.”….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.

So before you buy that next package of ground beef or box of frozen patties, be sure to ask yourself if you feel lucky.

As mentioned in the above linked Naked Capitalism blog post as well as the two New York Times articles, feces contamination is the culprit, so the amount of surface area exposed inside a meat processing facility is a key risk factor, and this risk must be multiplied by the number of animals and processing plants that make up the ground beef. A home grind drastically lowers the numbers on both sides of the equation, so it certainly reduces, if not completely eliminates, the chance of e. coli in my burgers.

For those that do not want to go through the added hassle of grinding their own beef, but don't necessarily like the idea of eating ammonia treated beef trimmings as part of their burgers, there are other steps that can be taken. The first is to find a trusty local butcher shop that buys whole sides of beef and grinds their own beef in the store. If this is not feasible, then buying a whole chuck or sirloin roast at your megamart and having the roast ground in the store is another option. Finally, many grocery chains, Publix included, will take the steaks, roasts, and other large cuts that are within a couple days of their "sell by" dates and grind them in the store, and sell them as "market" ground beef. This ground beef will NOT contain fat percentage markings, as the selections will vary daily and there is no in-store inspector. Still, if you ask the butcher, they can tell you when the meat was ground, and often tell you what cuts made up the bulk of the grind. If they talk, you will usually be happy to learn that the expensive and/or organic selections make up the bulk of the selection, as turnover rate tends to vary the most on these items. The cost is just as low or lower than the other ground beefs, and will contain no ammonium treated trimmings, and tastes very fresh as long as it used within a couple of days. With any option, the cleanliness of the grinding equipment should also be questions, but even Mrs. Hommes, who loves to accuse me of being a food snob (justifiably so in some cases), is willing to make a little extra effort to upgrade the selection of ground beef found in our frig.

Are the chances of being infected by e. coli incredibly small? Absolutely. Does that mean that meat producers are doing everything they can and should be doing considering the risks versus profits? Absolutely not.