It’s hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss’s
New York Timesblockbuster investigative piece
on E. coli in industrial beef, which is centered on the plight of
Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left comatose, near death and
now paralyzed from eating a
single Cargill hamburger.
Of course, a “single hamburger” can include meat from hundreds, some
would say thousands, of animals. As Moss puts it:

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.

This is why a food safety expert who helped develop tracking systems
for E. coli in meat can declare that, “Ground beef is not a completely
safe product.” No kidding. The problem, however, is not with E. coli in
general. The problem is that the particular strain of E. coli which
infected Smith—known as E. coli O157:H7—is virulent, deadly, persistent
and endemic in industrial beef. How virulent, deadly and persistent?
This much:

Food scientists have registered increasing concern about the
virulence of this pathogen since only a few stray cells can make
someone sick, and they warn that federal guidance to cook meat
thoroughly and to wash
up afterward is not sufficient. A test by The Times found that the safe
handling instructions are not enough to prevent the bacteria from
spreading in the kitchen.

In other words, if a piece of infected meat ends up in your kitchen,
you are almost guaranteed exposure to it no matter how carefully you
handle it. And how endemic? This year alone almost half a million
pounds of E. coli infected ground beef have been recalled nationwide
(and that doesn’t include the 800,000 pounds of Cargill beef recalled
for contamination with antibiotic-resistant salmonella). Indeed, if
Moss’s work proves anything, it’s that the safety systems in industrial
beef processing are both barely functioning and almost fully opaque.
And while the government is able to peek behind the curtain at these
massive slaughterhouses and processing facilities, it seems far more
concerned with protecting companies’ intellectual property than with
the public health.