I stopped eating processed ground beef after I finished reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, who talked about how hamburger meat is made for your consumption. There is literally shit in the meat, the author wrote, and the industry is not regulated by the government enough to ensure that we are eating safe food. If you don't time to read the book, then at least read the reviews on Amazon.com. And then politely tell loved ones and backyard burger-flippers, "thanks, but no thanks, for that hamburger."

Fast Food Nation was written a few years ago, and although the book was a call to arms (and changed the way I looked at food altogether), very little, if anything, has been done to protect us from food-borne diseases like E-Coli. Part of this is because the food industry has so much pull with the government, and part of it was the anti-regulatory approach of the Republican administration that ran Washington for eight years. But the Democrats are not much better. Profit over people is the national religion.

This issue surfaced again a few weeks ago when the New York Times ran a lengthy article about a woman who is paralyzed from eating bad meat. True, her paralysis was a freak event, but it highlights the risks associated with eating commercial ground beef. The article was enough to make you swear off food altogether. Next time someone tells you that government regulation is bad for the economy and impinges on economic freedom, show them the Times article.

Some highlights from the article:

Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.

...

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

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Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together. The United States Department of Agriculture, which allows grinders to devise their own safety plans, has encouraged them to test ingredients first as a way of increasing the chance of finding contamination.

Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. 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. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.

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In the weeks before Ms. Smith’s patty was made, federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”

The article talks about lax enforcement of food safety rules and how companies don't want to go the extra mile to ensure that the food is safe. One of the reasons we even have a government is to have a neutral regulator look out for public safety. This is the job of the Executive Branch, what is commonly known as the Presidency, where all the federal agencies are situated. The New York Times did speak to a government offical about this issue. This is what he said, and this comment entitles the Times reporter to a Pulitzer Prize. Never before and never again will we see such brazen honesty and pathological disregard for public health:

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.