A while back, I read an article about a young woman who ate a beef patty her mother prepared resulting in the destruction of her health! She is now very limited in what she can accomplish in the future unless there is a miraculous recovery. She was very active, now she can barely walk. Her entire life has been changed, a different future now faces her, one she certainly would not have chosen.
Why did this happen you ask?
To save production expenses.
There is such a thing as going too far in curbing expenses.
The meat in the beef patty was a mixture of beef coming from all over the world. Below are some excerpts from an article in the New York Times:
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, 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. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
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.
“Ground beef is not a completely safe product,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bender, a food safety expert at the University of Minnesota
In the weeks before Ms. Smith’s patty was made, federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”
………..audits of Uruguay’s meat operations conducted by the U.S.D.A. have found sanitation problems, including improper testing for the pathogen.
The above excerpts cover only a small part of what the article reveals about meat production. Please read the full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html
If you read it, you will have great reservations about eating ANY ground beef at this time.
It is very disturbing that the agencies responsible for the protection of the public from the cost cutting insanity performed by the food industry is allowed to happen. Practically without repercussions.
The last paragraph from the article:
For Ms. Smith, the road ahead is challenging. She is living at her mother’s home in Cold Spring, Minn. She spends a lot of her time in physical therapy, which is being paid for by Cargill in anticipation of a legal claim, according to Mr. Marler. Her kidneys are at high risk of failure. She is struggling to regain some basic life skills and deal with the anger that sometimes envelops her. Despite her determination, doctors say, she will most likely never walk again.
What can be done? What should be done? Why aren’t those responsible in jail?