NY Times In-Depth Investigation Into The American Hamburger World
Stephanie Smith - Picture from NY Times
A simple hamburger caused a young children’s dance instructor to become violently ill, in a coma for 9 days and ultimately left paralyzed. Later it was revealed that e-coli was the culprit.
The New York Times Sunday edition paper published an in-depth investigation about the outbreak. The investigation is probably the best researched article ever and will surely do more for the American beef industry than any lawyer, legislator, or lobbyist ever will.
The Times traced the story of the burger that Smith (the dance instructor) consumed. Ground beef is usually produced by companies referred to as grinders or processing plants. In this case it was Cargill.
The meat is typically purchased from slaughterhouses, “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.”
In this case, confidential Cargill records indicated that the hamburger was made from, “a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings 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.”
Note, there are no Federal requirement for the grinder to test the meat purchased from the slaughterhouses. In fact, the article states that slaughterhouses might refuse to sell the meat if they know that the grinder is testing the meat.
Furthermore:
the largest ingredient was beef trimmings known as “50/50” — half fat, half meat — that cost about 60 cents a pound, making them the cheapest component.
Cargill bought these trimmings — fatty edges sliced from better cuts of meat — from Greater Omaha Packing, where some 2,600 cattle are slaughtered daily and processed in a plant the size of four football fields.
It was reported that:
Cattle often arrive with smears of feedlot feces that harbour the E.coli pathogen, and the hide must be removed carefully.
This is a lengthy article that is difficult to summarize. Click here for NY Times anatomy of a burger.
Trade secret, confidential logs redacted, federal inspectors noting citations and lack of adequate industry standards seems to have contributed to this outbreak.
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