Beef products aren't beef

Americans love hamburger. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of eating out in the backyard, my dad making special cheeseburgers (two VERY thin patties with a slice of sharp cheddar cheese pressed between them and the edges sealed), with buns toasted to perfection on the grill, smeared with bright yellow mustard and maybe a dab of ketchup, a big beefsteak tomato slice and a fresh, crisp green lettuce leaf. All the major food groups, held in a package that even kid hands could handle.

Yet as the horror stories of E. coli have grown in the past several years, I've basically avoided commercially made hamburgers, preferring to buy local grass-fed beef and grind it myself (the food processor can do the job, if you don't mind the uneven chunks, which I kind of like). And even then, beef isn't on the menu very often.

So it was with a detached squeamishness that I read today's excellent New York Times story headlined, "Company's Record on Beef Treatment Questioned." To think of all that effort to eradicate problems that come up with processing, when for years just following common sense and sanitary practices were enough, just boggles the mind as it turns the stomach. And the company, while turning down the Times' request for interviews or tours of its facilities, sounded rather cavalier in its response:

“B.P.I.’s track record demonstrates the progress B.P.I. has made compared to the industry norm,” the company said. “Like any responsible member of the meat industry, we are not perfect.”

But it was this line that stopped me in my tracks:

The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Yes, adults can make the choice not to eat at McDonald's or Burger King and the other restaurants that rely on Beef Products Inc.'s ammonia-treated ground beef parts, but what choice do those children have? To eat or not eat? To go hungry and not be able to focus on the afternoon's assignments?

And yet despite their record of repeated contamination, which indicated the ammonia treatment isn't consistent at best, the officials of Beef Products Inc. are free to run their business as they see fit.

I have just one word for the practice: Criminal. And no amount of weasel-talk can make our food safer, just action on the part of the government we trust with our health.

Getting to the nut of the matter

Like a lot of folks who prefer scientific curiosity to spreading alarm or sticking one's head in the sand, I've been reading a lot on salmonella lately. The Internet is indeed a boon and a curse. Some of the most popular hits contain the most appalling ignorance, such as calling salmonella a virus; one top hit is the Yahoo Answers, where someone asked if a pizza oven can kill salmonella and the answer voted "best answer" was "no..."

As far as the sites go, there's a lot of good info on salmonella.org, although the two San Diego State researchers who work on it emphasize that they are not medical doctors and to go see one if you have symptoms.

As Margie Lee, a microbiologist at UGA's College of Veterinary Medicine, was quoted in a University of Georgia Research Magazine article a while back:

Salmonella infections also have been associated with vegetables. "Because of organic gardening, people use manure," she said, "And a lot of it hasn't been composted," which kills most types of salmonellae.
Each year, there are 23 million reported cases of illness caused by all food-borne bacteria, and of these, 9,000 are fatal. Of those, salmonella is the least threatening, Lee said.
Even though people become sick from salmonella poisoning, it rarely becomes deadly. "[Salmonella] doesn't merit the public's fear. Car accidents kill more people," Lee said. "You have to look at what is really lost, and on the whole, it's seldom life."
But since the genetic markers that indicate the deadly strain of the bacteria are not even visible under a microscope, people should play it safe. "Cook your chicken and eggs well," Lee said. "That's the bottom line."

Pistachios: Nuts not all bad

Love to munch on pistachios? If they are salted and roasted, there's no chance that you can get salmonella from them; the roasting process kills the bacteria.

Kraft last week had to recall trail mix that had tainted pistachios in it, mostly because the California plant that processed the pistachios were mixing raw and roasted nuts together, a big no-no.

But as big a producer as California is, it's not the largest supplier of pistachios. That falls to Iran, where the pistachio was first domesticated. Here's a chart showing where most of the world's pistachios come from.

Country               Share of 2005 production
                          (in tons)
Iran                     190 000
United States       140 000
Turkey                 60 000
Syria                   60 000
China                   34 000
Greece                 9 500
Italy                     2 400
Uzbekistan             1 000
Tunisia                     800
Pakistan                   300
Madagascar             160
Kyrgyzstan               100
Morocco                     50
Cyprus                       15
Mexico                         7
Mauritius                     5

Statistics from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Asian white pepper alert

Your white pepper is probably safe. But if you have any ground white pepper packaged under the Lian How or Uncle Chen brands, throw it out. The spice, imported from Vietnam, is contaminated with salmonella and has sickened a number of people on the West Coast.

Wondering how a spice could pick up salmonella? Food science writer Harold McGee had an excellent post here on the processing of white pepper and how it can pick up off-flavors. It didn't mention bacterial contamination, but you easily can see how it might happen.

Food safety in America

I turn my blog over today to the lead editorial in the New York Times today, an excellent commentary on the issue of food safety. 

Dangerous Food

The more investigators look into the latest food-safety scandal involving the Peanut Corporation of America, the worse it gets. It now appears that as many as nine people have died and 19,000 have been sickened after eating cookies, crackers or institutional peanut butter tainted with salmonella from a plant in Georgia owned by the company.

At a charged Congressional hearing last week, company executives refused to answer questions on the advice of their attorneys, but the questions told much of the story. “The food poisoning of people — is that just a cost of doing business?” one congressman asked. When another angrily asked the company’s president if he would like to try some of the recalled products, he refused.

The company is facing a criminal inquiry and has now filed for bankruptcy court protection. But it would be a mistake to view this as “an unconscionable act by one manufacturer,” as an official from the American Peanut Council, the industry’s trade association, said.

While most successful food producers are far more diligent — big name-brand peanut butter is considered safe, for example — American consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years. Congress and the Obama administration must finally make food safety a serious priority.

The new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, is talking about creating “a modern, unified food-safety agency capable of reducing the risk of food-borne illness.” Many thoughtful food-safety experts have been calling for such an approach for years. Today’s patchwork system requires frozen pizzas to be inspected by two agencies: one if they’re cheese and another if they’re pepperoni.

A one-stop agency could take time in Washington. Until then, Mr. Vilsack should look at ways to strengthen current federal and state systems for avoiding food hazards. Congress needs to find more money for inspectors, especially at the Food and Drug Administration.

The F.D.A. also should have the authority to recall tainted food quickly, establish strict federal standards on cleanliness and create an advanced system for tracking foods so that any tainted products can be culled from the food supply more quickly. Finally, Congress should require a more efficient way to test food products and give government food inspectors the authority to review those results more easily.

What was particularly galling about the latest recall was how federal inspectors had to threaten to use anti-terrorism laws to finally gain access to the Peanut Corporation of America’s testing reports. Those reports showed how samples were re-tested if they were contaminated and how some products were shipped even before the tests showing salmonella had come in.

President Obama promised during the campaign to create a government that does a better job of protecting the American consumer. The nation’s vulnerable food supply is a healthy place to start.

Badder peanut butter update

The peanut butter salmonella outbreak has sickened more than 400 people across the country and is believed to have contributed to the deaths of three people. The company that distributed the tainted peanut butter recalled it earlier this week, saying that the outbreak was conclusively linked to its product.

Salmonella typhimurium, the type implicated in the national outbreak, is only one of the many strains of the deadly bacteria. Epidemiologists estimate there are about 2,500 types of salmonella.

A badder peanut butter

An Ohio peanut butter distributor issued a voluntary recall Saturday for two brands of peanut butter as health officials continue the search for the source of a salmonella outbreak that has been reported in 42 states.

Officials from the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture issued a product warning Friday after preliminary laboratory testing indicated the presence of salmonella in a container of creamy peanut butter from King Nut, according to published reports.

Late Saturday, King Nut Companies of Solon, Ohio, announced it had issued a recall of all peanut butter distributed under its label and manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America, of Lynchburg, Va. The company also recalled its distribution of Parnell's Pride peanut butter, which is also made by Peanut Corporation, according to a prepared statement by King Nut.