When You’re Right, You’re Right a/k/a The Beef’s Gone Bad!

Now, I’m not one to belabor things or fixate or tell you “I told you so” or beat a dead horse (all of you that are currently laughing, stop it!); but on this one, I felt I had to say something.

Back on July Fourth, you may remember I did a little ranting and raving while discussing why I would not be cooking at my buddy’s place. Without rehashing the whole thing, I was adamant in my desire not to make hamburgers with pre-packaged ground beef. There was the obvious taste aspect, but there was also the E. coli aspect which loomed much larger for me. I wasn’t going to get people sick with low quality ground beef, when perfectly good beef could be obtained at the grocery store.

This past Sunday, New York Times reporter Michael Moss published a piece about a 22 year old former dance instructor from Minnesota named Stephanie Smith; who in 2007 ate a pre-packaged hamburger tainted with E. coli. She had eaten a primarily vegetarian diet; but visiting her mother that day she ate a hamburger her mother pulled out of a box, unwrapped and then grilled for her. She did what millions of other Americans do nearly every day. And whether they’re eating pre-made hamburger patties or making patties at home with pre-mixed ground beef, they’re gambling with every bite they take. Slaughterhouses and grinding companies have “unwritten agreements to stand in the way of ingredient testing, and that can directly lead to E. coli contamination. It can get so wide-spread that the company that produced the hamburger that Stephanie ate ended up recalling 844,812 pounds of hamburger patties…EIGHT HUNDRED FORTY FOUR THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND TWELVE.

I mean, I love a good burger as much as the next guy; but I realize that supermarket ground beef isn’t very good…and it has the added chance of making you very sick or possibly killing you. Most people cite price or convenience as the reason for buying supermarket ground beef, but let’s break it down. The burger that Stephanie Smith ate came from four…F-O-U-R…different sources and from god only knows how many different cows. It was made up of “Fresh fat” (50/50 fat and meat from fatty edges from whole cuts of meat) from Greater Omaha Packing in Nebraska; “Fresh lean” (trimmings from dairy cows and bulls that are too old for feedlot fattening) from Lone Star Beef Processors in Texas; “Frozen lean” (trimmings from grass-fed cattle) from an unnamed slaughterhouse in Uruguay and “Lean finely textured beef” (trimmings warmed and put through a centrifuge to remove fat, and treated with ammonia to kill bacteria). Now read that again and tell think about if that’s something you’d want to eat. The final cost of the Frankenburger eaten by Stephanie: $1 per pound, “or about 30 cents less than industry experts say it would cost for ground beef made from whole cuts of meat.”

Now let’s think about the other side of the spectrum. Labor Day Weekend, I made burgers for the family from a blend of beef as well. The difference was that I called Wegman’s, asked if they could do it for me and then waited while one of their butchers ground two pounds of brisket and a pound of sirloin for me to turn into burgers: two pounds of brisket, from one cow and one pound of sirloin from another cow (or possibly the same cow, but not likely). The final cost of that meat came to approximately $6.31 per pound…five dollars more than Stephanie’s burger, but with the added bonus of knowing where the meat came from (theoretically), freshly ground beef with virtually zero chance of getting E. coli and the added benefit of taste.

Wegman's Call-Ahead Ground Beef

Now I’m not saying you’ve got to go out like I did getting ground brisket and sirloin at close to $7 a pound to eat a tasty burger, but there are alternatives to eating crappy pre-packaged ground beef. Go to a butcher, have him grind you a cheaper cut that came from O-N-E cow.

In short, the New York Times expanded upon what I said back in July…be careful about where you get your ground beef. I’m not going to change the way I eat, I’m not going to stop eating my burgers medium-rare and I’m not becoming a vegetarian. But what I will do is refuse to eat pre-made burger patty out of a box or buy pre-packaged ground beef from a grocery store.