Quote:
Originally Posted by guzzy
I stand corrected.... the meat comes in contact with the intestine.
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Actually that's wrong as well.
Disclaimer: I worked 15 years in the meat packing plant, from the lowliest peon to having personal connections with people in almost the highest level of management. I cannot be 100% sure of every detail that I relate here, but I never heard any contradictory evidence during those 15 years to lead me to believe any of is was incorrect. I worked at facilities that both produced and/or used beef that was processed at XL in Calgary, Lakeside in Brooks and Cargill in High River. I knew people who worked at pretty much every major plant in Alberta.
What happens is that when it is wet in the yard that the cattle are dropped of in is wet, and some of them crap on the ground. Then crap flings up and sticks to the legs of the cows, which can't be 100% washed off.
The cow is knocked, bled and then proceeds to have it's hide removed, starting at the leg. During this procedure, despite all reasonable precautions, occasionally tiny pieces of ingesta end up on the the exterior of fat on the skinned leg.
The rest of the hide is removed, all organs are removed, the cow is split into sides and it is sent to the cooler. At this point it is visually inspected for ingesta probably 5-6 times per 'area' for the rest of the process. Any ingesta is removed through whatever reconditioning process the governing body of the country deems safe, for example in Canada it is trimming off the surrounding area with a knife. Up to this point the process is pretty much universal to all modern meat packing plants.
Now here is the part where Lakeside failed, or more correctly, could have done better:
After a side is done in the slaughter area (a dirty area) and before it goes into the cooler, it would be nice to have a 'cleaning process' that would help remove the small bits of injesta and sanitize the exterior of the side. The best process for doing this is through radiation, but it produces some bad side effects since you are really just microwaving the beef, so last I heard no one was using it in a large scale facility.
Next is pasteurization, which is just like it sounds, where you essentially use steam or heat to kill the bacteria on the exterior of the cow. The Lakeside plant in Brooks, doesn't own a patent or rights to that technology, like Cargill does, so they can't use it. This technology is apparently so good that you can just eat the injesta straight up because of the small bacteria count.
However, for the life of me, I can't remember what the process is called that they use out there, but it isn't as good.
So you have a system that can't possibly remove all ingesta, and as a result all E.Coli bacteria from the system before it hits the 'clean' area where the meat is processed before it is ground. So any one misses one piece, often smaller than the head of a pin, and you get contamination. This obviously happens all the time, because the nightmare it would create in production to have 100% assurances would be far too immense to allow for any sort of profit to be made, and no one would run meat packing plants.
So they run tests all day on the product, based on a policy approved by whatever regulatory body governs that kind of thing in the country you are in. If you find a certain number of pieces in a sample of a bin/box of meat that is destined to be ground, they need to reprocess the entire bin/box. If you fail multiple bins in a shift, you might need to redo ALL bins for that shift. It really depends on the policy, but it is something along those lines.
So the government inspectors are deciding what level of contamination is allowed through, with certain levels being ok, certain being 'shut down the facility' type bad. Of course, the inspectors end up with boxes of meat in their trunk or sitting on their doorstep, probably with cash along to grease the wheels if something bad happens, so that can't help the amount that actually gets through.
So, cook your ground beef to 160, or like Ken said, only accept medium-rare burgers from a place that you know has ground it from the primal (big chunk of beef - the entire muscle typically). If it was ground in the plant, you should assume 100% that is has some level of e.coli in it.
Cheapest place to buy ground beef?
