Can You Trust Your Burger?

With the exception of the vegetarians among us, most of us love to sink our teeth into a big, juicy, beef burger now and then. Perhaps we are satisfying some primal desire when we do this. Apparently, we may also taking a big gamble with our health.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold story about a 22-year-old dance instructor named Stephanie Smith who suffered severe E. coli poisoning in 2007 after eating a hamburger that her mother had grilled. According to the story, the food poisoning "ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed." It's unlikely that she will ever walk again.

The frozen burger had been made by food giant Cargill and, indeed, from the description on the package it sounded appetizing enough: "Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties." But according to the story, here's what really went into the burger:

"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."

Not so appetizing. The story reveals that "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." This information is not new; it's been described by Eric Schlosser in "Fast Food Nation" and Michael Pollan in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," among other publications.

The Times reports that ground beef has been blamed for 16 E. coli outbreaks in the last three years alone. I still remember the one in 1994 that hit Jack in the Box restaurants, an outbreak in which four children died. Ever since then, meat companies and grocers have been banned from selling ground beef tainted by the potentially fatal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7. I should hope so.

And yet, as the Times story makes painfully clear, our food safety system is far from perfect. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts some 15,000 E. coli spot checks per year but acknowledges they are not meant to be comprehensive. And, according to the Times, "Many slaughterhouses and processors have voluntarily adopted testing regimes, yet they vary greatly in scope from plant to plant." Often the cuts that go into mass-produced patties are those closest to the agent of contamination -- cow feces.

It remains to be seen whether the Times story, which a friend described as "a searing indictment of Big Beef," has any effect on food safety policy as it relates to public health.

I like a good burger as much as the next carnivore. But I long ago stopped putting my trust in USDA spot checks or Big Beef. I stopped eating fast-food burgers after the 1994 E. coli outbreak, and I don't let my kids eat them, either. For this I am often labeled, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not, a food Nazi. But of course, it's not just about fast food. The beef that paralyzed Stephanie Smith was purchased in a grocery store. How careful do we have to be?

These days, I'm very careful. If I buy ground beef, I buy it from the meat department of a grocery store that grinds its own, using organic beef that has not been treated with hormones or antibiotics. Or I buy the beef in one piece and grind it up myself in the food processor. Is it more expensive? Yes, a lot -- which means we eat fewer burgers and more pasta (OK by me).

What about ordering a burger at a restaurant? I do from time to time, especially in non-chain restaurants that I know and trust. But I always order mine (and my kids') medium-well, to insure that any bacteria present have been killed off by heat.

Still, after reading the harrowing story of Stephanie Smith, it's unlikely that I'll either order or make a burger again without asking specifically where the meat came from and how it was processed. If that makes me a food Nazi, so be it. It also makes me, and my kids, safer.