Generally Regarded As Safe — our food

www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.htmlYes it’s terrible, a young woman ate a burger and became a paraplegic. E-coli H 157 had struck.Sunday, the NYT traced the story of her burger from slaughter to consumer.

“Ms Smith’s reaction to the virulent strain of E. coli was extreme, but tracing the story of her burger, through interviews and government and corporate records (showing the  many stages of turning beef into burger)  obtained by The New York Times, shows why eating ground beef is still a gamble.

Note the words “still a gamble”…

Listen up, eating is risky, just as everything in life is risky. The mistake is to believe that anything we do is 100% safe.

The story implicitly critcizes the many vulnerable stages in the processing of the burger, and as I read, I’m amazed so few people become ill.  In the US, foodborne bacteria account for 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths on an annual basis.

Do you believe any food can be guaranteed safe? Even if that burger had   been made from a cow slaughtered tenderly in your own backyard, there is no guarantee that an opportunistic bug wouldn’t get into it. Sure you can cook your beef to a fare thee well and be ALMOST sure you’ve killed any pathogens, but then what would the beef taste like? I don’t eat hamburgers out any more because now, for health reasons they are all overcooked.

I buy fresh ground and eat it raw or rare. I’m more likely to win the lottery than get ill.

The obsession with the chimera of 100% safe food is what is dooming one of the great delicacies, raw milk cheese.  And eventually it will doom charcuterie, any food matured by microbes.  When I was writing Last chance to eat, I talked to health authorities, the FDA, and the answer I got over and over again was “We can’t ok any food that might be unsafe.”

This is unfair to consumers as there can be no such guarantee. The FDA regularly calls food and additives — such as the STP or dry cleaning fluid okayed to plump up commercial scallop – GRAS   Generally Regarded as Safe.  Why not label all regulated food the same way?