What’s Wrong with Conventional Food Processing

Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Inspection of Ground Beef – Meat processing is a scary industry. Crowded feed lots where animals stand in their own manure greatly increase the chances that E. coli will contaminate the meat. Poor conditions in the slaughter houses, who are pushed to process more and more animals/hour, provide the perfect conditions for allowing the contaminate to spread:

“The cattle often arrive with smears of feedlot feces that harbor the E. coli pathogen, and the hide must be removed carefully to keep it off the meat. This is especially critical for trimmings sliced from the outer surface of the carcass.

“Federal inspectors based at the plant are supposed to monitor the hide removal, but much can go wrong. Workers slicing away the hide can inadvertently spread feces to the meat, and large clamps that hold the hide during processing sometimes slip and smear the meat with feces, the workers and inspectors say.”

I don’t take PETA’s extreme views (and I eat meat, preferably humanely-raised meat) but they have some footage that will make you wonder if you ever want to eat meat again. I have a friend who bought a meat grinder and grinds her own meat. I am thinking about doing the same,or at a minimum asking the butcher to grind a cut of beef for me while I shop. Far safer.

One telling factor mentioned in the article is that the distributors who decide to test for themselves before grinding end up with no one supplying them. Costco is one of the few who insists on it, and Tyson will no longer supply them. Comforting, huh? Others have given up trying to test:

“The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. ‘They would not sell to us,’ said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. ‘If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.’”

Here’s the other problem:
“Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department [USDA] whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets … 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.”

The fox is guarding the hen house.