Grist: Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants

[marmar]

Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants
by Tom Philpott


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Sometimes I think I write a little too much about the meat industry. But the news it generates is so consistently grave, and so generally underreported, that I can’t resist. Moreover, outbreaks of E. coli and MRSA are really ecological markers—feedback that our way of producing meat is deeply unsustainable and really quite dangerous. We ignore these news flashes from our ecoystem at our peril. So I scribble on.

Here’s the latest: In Colorado, 14 people have fallen ill from hamburger meat tainted with antibiotic-resistent salmonella, the Boulder newspaper Daily Camera reports. (Note that antibiotic-resistent salmonella is distinct from MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, increasingly associated with industrial meat production, that kills 20,000 Americans each year—more than AIDS.)

The bad burger came from a Denver-based supermarket chain called King Soopers, which has now recalled 466,236 pounds of it.

It’s Meat Wagon tradition to convert such abstract-seeming figures into what we like to call Quarter Pounder Equivalents. According to our proprietary computer models, King Soopers has officially released enough suspect beef for McDonald’s to crank out approximately 1.86 million Quarter Pounders. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-24-meat-wagon-antibiotic-resistant-salmonella/

[imdjh]

1. Everytime I see meat in the grocery store, I wonder about this kind of thing.

Chicken not so much, because chicken is generally grown and packed closer to market than red meat, but I'm not kidding myself about chicken. There is a reason you can sometimes smell the bleach they washed it in.

But when I see red meat in the grocery store, every time I see red meat in the grocery store, I wonder how it's even possible for "fresh" meat to come to market from so far away and especially store that don't have their own butchers I think about those meat packing plants somewhere in the midwest and how little certainty I have that this meat has been properly handled and refrigerated the entire time.

How can meat have a longer "sell by" date in an open cooler in the store than I would even consider in my closed refrigerator?

How can canned meats have incredible shelf lives? How is that even possible? Preservatives? What exactly do they preserve? The quality or the appearance?

And yet, I'm a sucker for deli meats and they are probably the worst.

[marmar]

2. True. Deli meats are probably the worst....There was a photo essay on deli meat processing....

....posted on some website. Needless to say, it wasn't pretty.

[imdjh]

3. Yeah, I saw them make bologna on TV and it was revolting.

That's another thing. Any time meat is handled in huge quantity, it is a visually disgusting thing. A clean dry roast in a fresh package isn't so bad if you don't think about it, but when you see whole sides of beef or piles of parts going into the hamburger grinder, it's something else entirely.