In Which I Solve This Ground Beef E.Coli Problem for Good

It started a couple of weeks ago, subtly, just before waking up on a rainy Saturday morning.  I couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but I didn’t feel quite right.  My skin seemed to be a little sensitive to my bedsheets, and I felt a little flushed.  Not long after, my joints and muscles started to ache.  By the time I rose and put myself in the shower, I knew for certain that I was coming down with something.  Little did I know that it was coming down on me.  And hard.  Within the matter of a couple of hours, my body  aches intensified.  That flushed feeling turned out to be a steadily rising fever — up to 104 degrees at points — and soon enough I’d be wracked with sweat and chills, not to mention a horde of stomach-marauding gastrointestinal symptoms that, for the sake of decency, I’ve decided not to share in graphic detail herewith.  Let’s just say that there was some sort of thermonuclear apocalypse going on in my digestive tract.  Oh yes, I was sick.  Really sick.  The kind of sick that permits you only one activity between trips to the bathroom: lying in bed, praying for death.  And there, in my darkened bedroom, fever dreaming, shivering in my own sweat and hoping against hope that I’d turn the corner soon, I tried to trace back this horrible illness to its root, to the vile culprit that, as it seemed at the time, was trying to destroy me from the inside out (and doing a pretty good job, I felt).  The doctor asked me a number of questions, one of which now started looking most relevant: “Did you eat or drink anything out of the ordinary in the last 24 hours?”

“Yes,” I replied.  “I had a hamburger at Wendys.”

* * *

Now, obviously, I can’t say for certain that the classic single with cheese I’d enjoyed the previous afternoon was at the root of all this GI devastation, and since I failed to keep a sample of my sandwich for bacterial testing purposes, it will forever be unknown whether that simple little burger was the criminal element.  However, my degree in philosophy leads me straight to the law of parsimony, otherwise known as Occam’s razor: all things being equal, the simplest solution is probably the right one.  Yup, I thought, the Wendys burger was probably the bad guy.  I think the more troubling question was, “Why on Earth would I, a food writer and a proselytizer of all things organic, local, unprocessed and wholesome, be eating a fast food hamburger?  Especially after everything I’ve learned about where this meat comes from?  Broken down old dairy cows that are fed chicken poop, for heaven’s sake!  What the hell were you thinking?”  Two reasons here.  First, they call it “fast food” for a reason.  I was out all day running errands, and was starving for a quick bite.  And if I’ve learned anything about myself, it’s that I get irritable when I’m hungry, and will usually look for the easiest solution to my empty stomach available, within reason.  Second is the nostalgia factor.  I grew up mere minutes from a Wendys restaurant, and ate there more than a few times throughout my early years, enough so that even the sight of a Wendy’s hamburger brings back pleasant memories from my youth, whether it was eating there on a road trip with my family, or hanging out for hours with my buddies after rehearsing with our band, mooching free refills of Dr. Pepper.  Hence, despite my fear and mistrust of industrialized beef, I caved.  What’s the worst a burger could do, right?  Little did I know.

Luckily, I got off easy.  After several days of antibiotics (G-d bless you, Xifaxan!), I’d turned the corner and was starting to eat solid food again.  Some people haven’t been so lucky.  Over 900 people were sickened by the tainted beef traced back to Cargill recently, among them a poor young woman named Stephanie Smith, who wound up suffering both brain damage and paralysis from a bad batch of beef.  No two ways about it, this is absolutely terrifying stuff, the things nightmares are made of.  I am not, of course, the first person to cover the horrors inflicted by our Kafka-esque industrial beef processing system, and I’m sure I won’t be the last.  Faster Times food politics correspondent Hannah Wallace has been doing a magnificent job weighing in on the situation.  So, being the Meat guy, I felt that it was my time to step in and let you know what I really think.

First, it’s crucial to know that just because the system is broken and scary and people are being poisoned, you don’t have to give up beef.  You don’t even have to give up ground beef, for that matter.  If you continue to indulge in bovine delights, however, you do need to be smart about it.  Indeed, there are safe ways to enjoy meatloaf and meatballs and all of  those other comfort classics.  In fact, there’s  basically just one extremely important rule you can follow to ensure that your next burger isn’t your last:

Don’t buy ground beef. Seriously.  To paraphrase that old Nike ad, “Just don’t do it.”  When you purchase ground beef in a store — unless that store is a quality butcher shop, and the proprietor can avail you of every last bit of information about his product — there’s no way for you to know what you’re getting, and what kind of bacteria you might be exposed to.  If that plastic shrink-wrapped package just says “hamburger meat,” it can come from any part of the cow, usually not the good parts, and I guarantee you that the animal providing that meat isn’t USDA Prime.  It’s a crapshoot, and I mean that literally; who knows how much fecal matter — the source of e.coli bacteria — is in that creepily anonymous package?  So stay away from that junk.  Don’t touch it with a borrowed hand.  Absolutely, the system needs to be reformed and more closely regulated, but there’s no telling when that’s going to start happening.  It’s basic economics, supply and demand: As soon as we stop purchasing this garbage ground beef and demanding a better, safer product, the sooner companies like Cargill will get the picture.

In the meantime, I implore you to make ground beef yourself.  Fact is, processed ground beef has exponentially higher rates of bacterial contamination than whole cuts.  All you need to do to ramp up your food safety at home while still enjoying a hearty hamburger is to grind the beef yourself.  I know, I know — grinding beef seems like a daunting chore, but it isn’t.  You don’t even need one of those intimidatingly huge commercial Hobart grinders you see in the butcher shop to do it.  Nope, all it takes is a few good cuts of steak and a food processor.  You can even use one of those nifty little jobs if you don’t have a bona fide Cuisinart.   Buy a couple of pounds of whole beef cuts — I like combining chuck steaks with sirloin to get the right blend of fat and lean — and slice them into one inch cubes.  Place them in your food processor, and within a few pulses, voila: ground beef.  Naturally, it’s not going to come out in those nice, long ribbons indicative of a top tier grinder, but who cares?  It’s just going into your hamburger, after all.  A hamburger, I’ll add, that’s significantly more likely to be free of nasty bacteria.  All this at a minimum of extra effort on your part.  And isn’t that little bit of additional work worth it to know that you’re doing your part to end this tainted ground beef nonsense for good, as well as ensuring that you won’t wind up wallowing in feverish pain for days?

No hamburger on the planet is worth that.  Trust me.  I’ve been there.