The video on the site is especially scary.
The story has two facets; the human interest story focuses on young Stephanie Smith, a dance instructor who is now having to use a wheelchair, possibly for the rest of her life. Why? Because of the scary story. She ate a contaminated hamburger.
That's right. She ate a bad bit of hamburger and so she might never walk again.
Every day hundreds of thousands of burgers are eaten and the vast majority of people have no issues.
When there is an issue with food poisoning, it is rarely worse than your average flu. You end up with the crappers or stomach ache, maybe with a bit of yarking thrown in for good measure. You feel lousy for a couple days and that's it.
But this video is a reminder that there are two things you never want to see the process of being made; meats, and the law. This one only covers meat.
It runs through the industry standard lack of throughness in inspecting our meat supply and the lack of accountability in preventing outbreaks of illness. It's amazing to me that more people aren't sick from their food.
This story highlights how the hamburger you get in your grocery store is often mixed with cuts of fat and castoff, less than premium meats in order to cut costs. It isn't well inspected. It isn't cleaned thoroughly. The hamburger that made Stephanie sick was actually a mix of crud from Nebraska, Texas, Uruguay and South Dakota. Yes, one of those isn't a state in the continental US, for those of you that are geography challenged. The hamburger from your local grocer could very well be a mutt of varying pedigree and chances are you have no way of finding out.
We take it for granted how our food is handled. We just get this end product and assume that a cow went in one end of the slaughterhouse and the red matter came out the other side, gets packed, shipped to the store and we buy it. Not so! What you're getting is a fine mix of varying quality meats meant to mix meat with fats in a way that is the lowest cost to your producer.
Fast food, for all the artificial stuff added to the foods for preserving it and enhancing flavor, isn't immune to the good old poisonings. E. Coli first made mainstream headlines with the public with an outbreak from a Jack In The Box, going to prove the workers in the kitchen blowing their noses on the grills to watch it sizzle isn't the only danger lurking in fast food and also proving that there is indeed some "real" food mixed in with the fast frankenfoods.
I have to say that this story was a little frightening. My current habitual diet is comprised of sliced turkey and sliced ham; it's not a pressed or mixed meat like hamburger (and I'm desperately hoping that there's at least a slightly better margin of safety to those meats), but we did find out that the stuff we buy comes from one of the largest meat companies that also happened to be paying for this woman's medical expenses...Cargill.
Hippies and tree huggers and general nuts with berries on the brains like to be very vocal in their advocacy of organic, natural foods, and denouncing anything from a wrapper, be it fast food or stuff off the grocer's shelf, as being beyond evil for the temple of the body. There are so many claims of how horrible everything we ingest is that it's hard to know if this poisoning in meat is something to worry about or if it was a fluke, and I'm merely disgusted by the stripping of ignorance behind what brings the clean and abstract food from the grocery store to my plate.
We already hear, repeatedly, about the ways foods will kill you.
- chemicals added to fast food.
- saturated fats
- sugars and empty calories in cakes, cookies, brownies, etc.
- high fructose corn syrup.
- artificial flavors and enhancers
- high sodium and calories in restaurant foods
- pesticides lacing vegetables and fruits
- maximum allowance of generally considered non-food items...like, for example, insect parts...in peanut butter, cereals, etc.
- most of the mcnugget isn't meat. It's corn. Surprise!
- portion sizes are sky-high
- diet drinks may actually increase your weight
- mercury is found in seafood
- workers in restaurants and fast food joints have been known to take...liberties...with your order. Especially if you ticked them off in some way.
- etc, etc, etc...
So...is this something to worry about? Or do we just keep living our lives in willful ignorance? Sometimes it really is true that ignorance is bliss.
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My husband and I made the decision to buy meat from local producers whenever possible. At least I know that they won't grind up old fat and treat it with ammonia. Their cattle are fed a combination of grass and corn and are not given growth hormones or antibiotics (unless, of course, they are sick.) I read most of the article to which you refer. It literally made me sick so I didn't finish it. At a family get-together, someone brought a box of burgers as their contribution to the party. I tasted a bit of it, and that was enough. The texture was poor, and it was practically tasteless. My Dad was a meat cutter back in the days when supermarket meat cutters actually broke down an entire side of beef and cut it up. He knew what cuts to bring home. He also mixed his own ground beef for his own personal consumption. We can all stand to eat a little less beef. We made the decision to buy more expensive beef and eat less of it.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you had a real benefit in that your dad was a butcher working in a place where he knew where everything was coming from. Unfortunately society wants cheaper and more convenient, which tends to come at the expense of the "old ways".
ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely sure how good or bad the trend is overall. I do know that when we're trying to scrimp to pay bills whether something was made in China or down the street makes less of a difference to us than when we have extra cash in the wallet. McD's and Walmart and all the others deliver on the promise of saving money and being "good enough"...unfortunately.