Tuesday's Table: Your Food, Your Safety, Your Health

(So its actually Wednesday -- sorry! -- but this is a Tuesday's Table topic.)

In case you missed it, the New York Times ran an excellent article this past Sunday about a healthy 22-year old dance instructor who is now paralyzed from the waist down because she ate a hamburger tainted with E. coli.  This article provides an excellent education in the industry of meat, and why you need always to be vigilant about it.  

The article is long, so I'll highlight some points for you:

• The only ingredient on the package that the contaminated burger came from:  "Beef."    
• The beef in the burger came from FOUR different slaughterhouses -- one of which was in Uruguay -- and included different grades of meat, different cuts, trimmings discarded from other cuts of meat, and processed, rendered fat;
• The processed fat is made from pieces of fat cut from different pieces of meat, which are melted together and washed with ammonia;
• Many slaughterhouses will only sell to grinders who agree not to test the meat for E. coli; and 
• Cargill, the company that made the hamburger patty that paralyzed that young dance instructor, is the largest private company in the U.S., with over $116 billion in revenues last year alone.  Food is big business.

And just in case you're thinking that maybe this article is a little alarmist in tone, or that this sort of thing almost never happens, consider the following:

•  It only takes a few stray cells of E. coli to seriously sicken an adult;
• Ground beef has led to 16 outbreaks of E. coli poisoning in the U.S. in the past 3 years;  
• Federal school lunch officials found E.coli in ground hamburger meat in 2006, 2008 and again this past summer;
• Contaminated ground beef was also responsible for a recall from over 3,000 grocers in 41 states across the country this summer; and
• Cooking to well-done is not sufficient to kill E. coli bacteria.

Those are some numbers, huh?

So what do you do?  Nothing carries a 100% guarantee of safety.  But buying from a local farmer goes a long way.  If you can't find a local farmer that you trust, at least find out about the stores you buy from.  The NYT article mentions that Costco, one of the country's largest retailers, does sample meat for E. coli before combining meat from different slaughterhouses into packages of hamburger or frozen patties.  You're still getting meat from different plants that slaughter thousands of cattle per day, but at least the distributor is inspecting the food for safety before packaging it up to sell to you.

The Rockstar and I stopped eating meat a few years ago, based primarily on our concerns about the U.S. food industry.  Then we found a local farmer who raises his animals on pasture, free-roaming -- not packed in lightless stalls, fed ground-up animal meal and pumped with antibiotics their entire lives.  And he sells his own meat straight to the public.  We've visited his farm.  We've been through his facilities and met the people who slaughter the animals.  We know where our meat comes from.  Since then, we've been enjoying poultry, pork and beef that not only tastes better, but, I believe, is healthier and safer than anything we would find in our average grocery store cooler.

A final note:  the word "Organic" on a package does NOT mean a food is safe or healthy (I once saw a package of "organic" gummy bears.  I was tempted to ask if they were also free-range.)  Its supposed to mean that your food was raised without certain chemicals, like insecticides.  But cows can be injected with growth hormone and antibiotics and still have their milk labeled "organic."  Try to familiarize yourself with proven and trusted food producers who aren't just trying to market a lifestyle to you.

I'll try to list helpful sources of information as I come across them, and I'll file them under the category "Real Food."

Here's to healthy eating, everyone.