The New York Times today published a spectacularly well-researched story about the prevalence of E. coli 0157:H7 -- the lethal kind -- in this nation's ground beef. It traced an E. coli-tainted hamburger that sickened a a young Minnesota woman to a combination of slaughterhouses and processing facilities that often exercise little or no caution over their products. It implicated the industrial meat-producing industry in a deadly practice of collusion that must, somewhere, be a crime:
"The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. 'They would not sell to us,' said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. 'If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.'"
What the reporter, Michael Moss, did not do, however, is invoke any of the widely circulated research about how the bacteria got into the cow in the first place:E. coli 0157:H7, which has only been around since 1980, can only thrive in the guts of cattle raised on corn and grain. Grass-fed cattle have far less of it, if they have it at all. Though the article mentions that some of the beef in the hamburger originated in Uruguay, and noted in a chart that the Uruguayan beef is grass-fed, it did not mention the grain-bacteria connection.
Odd, because this is not new stuff. Michael Pollan explains it on page 82 of The Omnivore's Dilemma, referring to research done by USDA microbiologist Jim Russell, who "found that swtiching a cow's diet from corn to grass or hay for a few days prior to slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157:H7 in the animal's gut by as much as 80 percent." Microbiologists have long known that bacteria that thrives in the neutral pH environment of a grass-fed ruminant's gut gets knocked down by human's powerful stomach acids. Russell and Francisco Diez-Gonzalez defended their work -- precisely and eloquently -- in Science Magazine as far back as 1998 (if you have a subscription, you can read it here; if not, email me and I'll send it to you).
Like I said, this is not new stuff. Estancia Beef, based in Uruguay, uses it as a major marketing point. I ran across the fact again on Friday night, when I'd cooked a super-rare grass-fed burger for my carnivorous husband (it was dark out; I didn't look carefully at the grilled meat). First I panicked, then I did what panickers do -- I did a Google search. Then I re-scanned Pollan's book to re-confirm what I already know: The deadly strain of E. coli that's been killing meat-eaters for the last 25 years is peculiar to factory-farmed, feedlot, grain-and-corn fattened and, frankly, abused cows.
Funny how the bad things humans do come back to bite us.
