The New York Times has an article about testing for E. Coli in meat. While I buy no ground meat any more, it does make me more certain I don’t want to be buying Tyson products.
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.
The retail giant Costco is one of the few big producers that tests trimmings for E. coli before grinding…
But even Costco, with its huge buying power, said it had met resistance from some big slaughterhouses. “Tyson will not supply us,” Mr. Wilson said. “They don’t want us to test.”
A Tyson spokesman, Gary Mickelson, would not respond to Costco’s accusation, but said, “We do not and cannot” prohibit grinders from testing ingredients. He added that since Tyson tests samples of its trimmings, “we don’t believe secondary testing by grinders is a necessity.”
h/t Dr. X.
All raw meat has some level of e.coli and if you test it you will find it. That’s why you cook it.
Lawyers are the only real regulators left!
Note that even the Publix spokesperson says, basically, that if you want to lessen the e.coli risk, you have to buy steak and have the butcher grind it. This story gives me the willies — more than that piece about Bilethon did.
eat more possum!
As my toddler Sunny says, “Eeee-yew!”
IAG: Buy prepackaged ground meat and you’re getting meet from hundreds of cows, and a vastly higher rate of contamination. I cook meat, all right, but I don’t want that in my kitchen (NZS is right to have it ground after you buy it). I also don’t want those chickens encased in plastic with added water and salt. The added water bursts out of the plastic when you open in, and is repulsive stuff.
If you have not seen Food Inc. it is a must see. http://www.foodincmovie.com
Is sausage equally suspect, and similarly “protected” from downstream inspection?
Seems like Tyson and the other packers would welcome downstream inspections. Add meatpacking to the list of things I don’t know anything about. But I know enough now, having read the NYT article.
Curing has anti-bacterial effect– that’s why people started doing it. Fresh or bulk sausage isn’t fully cured, though but people tend to cook it to death, cooking it closer to charcoal briquette done-ness (and thus bacterial death). Smaller pieces, too.
Isn’t there bacteria on basically everything we come in contact with?
I also don’t want those chickens encased in plastic with added water and salt.
Sanderson Farms, if its packaging can be believed, doesn’t add water to its chickens, so that’s what I buy. (Still amazed that Tyson et al. can get away with adding water to food sold by weight, but that’s America for ya.)
Little freaked out on the ground-beef thang. Even if they grind the beef for you in the store, how clean is their grinder? Bleah. … N.b. that the NYT article says even soap won’t get E. coli off your cutting board. Keep bleach spray under the counter for that purpose, seems to be their advice.
Sanderson is what I buy at Krogers, but I vastly prefer the ones you can get not encased in plastic in real butcher shops or nicer grocery stores in cities. Sanderson still throws off some liquid, though not as bad as Tyson (which I’ve pretty much gone to boycott on).
I keep bleach spray under the counter, but also put the cutting board straight in the dishwasher after using it to prep meat, which I save for the last prep task.
Here’s one folks may not know. You know the black packaging that seems to have a lot of air in it? And don’t you wonder why the meat doesn’t oxidize in it? That’s because the air in it is carbon monoxide, injected into the package to give the meat that nice cherry-red color that it will hold after meat left in ordinary conditions goes grey. And where did I first see this packaging? Walmart, of course.
The sell-you-water-at-meat prices started with the processors convincing the USDA they should get to add water back to hams to make up from water loss in processing. Thus they started ruining hams. Having discovered the joy of selling water at meat prices, they began extending the practice to other meat. I encountered it first with pork, then chicken. I’ve also read that the raising/breeding practices mean that industrial chicken needs the brining or there’s a problem with the breast meat, although I don’t believe that.
Commentor, E Coli is not normally found in muscle. It’s contamination. And it can make people very sick.
Same thing with salmonella. The salmonella-egg thing is a recent phenomena– not something not previously noticed, but only something that has arisen with industrial egg processing. I’ve read that there’s no signs of a similar problem with local or yard eggs.
Did you ever wonder about those dietary laws Moses came up when he lead the Israelites out of Egypt into the Sinai? We Gentiles have never paid too attention to them. Maybe we should.