I’ve seen this story in a few tweets, so here’s Karen Dawn’s synopsis of the NY Times front page story. If you eat meat, you need to read this and learn the dangers of your choice.
The Sunday, October 4, New York Times has an article on the front page, titled, “The Burger That Shattered Her Life.”
The piece, by reporter Michael Moss, opens with a description of a young woman permanently paralyzed after having eaten an e-coli tainted burger. It then describes the process by which the burger got to her dinner plate.
It reminds us that “hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses.”
Of the hamburger in question we learn: “The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.”
We read about cattle arriving at slaughterhouses smeared with the feces they’ve been living in at feedlots, which is often inadvertently spread to the meat as workers slice away at the carcasses or when “large clamps that hold the hide during processing sometimes slip and smear the meat with feces …”
The article makes it clear that testing for e-coli is beyond lax. We read:
“An Agriculture Department survey of more than 2,000 plants taken after the Cargill outbreak showed that half of the grinders did not test their finished ground beef for E. coli; only 6 percent said they tested incoming ingredients at least four times a year.”
And:
“Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies.”Even after the outbreak that paralyzed the woman on whom the article focuses, we learn that Cargill, the production plant from which that meat had come, “agreed to increase testing of finished ground beef … but would not test incoming ingredients.”
We read about Department of Agriculture (USDA) investigation of Cargill and learn that “investigators discovered that their own inspectors had lodged complaints about unsanitary conditions at the plant in the weeks before the outbreak, but that they had failed to set off any alarms within the department. Inspectors had found ‘large amounts of patties on the floor,’ grinders that were gnarly with old bits of meat …’”
Moss also tells us of USDA slaughterhouse inspection reports that were released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act with blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation. The reporter comments:
“Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets.”
That conflict of interest and the resulting danger to the U.S. food supply is covered in depth in Fast Food Nation. I also look at it, often citing Fast Food Nation, in Thanking the Monkey, pages 187-193.
You’ll find the whole fascinating New York Times article online.
Check it out, and please e-mail it to all of your friends. You can read some of the readers’ comments and post your own beneath the article. And most importantly, please send a letter to the editor. Few of the comments either discuss the treatment of the animals on feedlots and in fast-paced slaughterhouses, or note how easy and healthful it is to live without consuming them. That is ground we can cover in letters to the editor.
The New York Times takes letters at letters@nytimes.com.
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published. And please be sure not to use any comments or phrases from me or from any other alerts in your letters. Editors are looking for original responses from their readers.
I send thanks to Lew Regenstein and Tim Gorski for making sure we all saw this article.
Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)
Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com for a fun celeb-studded promo video and information on Karen Dawn’s book, “Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals,” which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the “Best Books of 2008.” And check out Karen’s new blog at www.ThankingtheMonkey.com/blog!
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Filed under: animal rights, factory farming Tagged: | animal cruelty, factory farming, there's shit in the meat
This article is a bit silly because you can catch ecoli from root vegetables as well as contaminated meat; in fact it is far easier to catch from root vegetables as something has to go seriously wrong with the meat rendering process (as stated in the article) before ecoli contamiation can occur.
(The IP address for this commenter comes from Tesco – a grocery store chain in the UK. –ed.)