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There is a "simple explanation for which eating a hamburger can now make you very sick," writes Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the Repas All-American. "There's shit in the meat. ”
A new Consumer Reports survey suggests that things have not changed much since the publication of the Schlosser blockbuster in 2001. The team tested 300 packages of ground beef, purchased from more than 100 grocery stores, supermarkets and health food stores in 26 cities in the United States. The result:
The 208 kilograms of beef we examined systematically contained bacteria that indicated faecal contamination (entérococus and/or E. coli that do not produce toxins), which can cause blood or urinary infections.
But not all minced meat is equal. Researchers also compared the bacterial load of meat from conventionally reared cattle (181 samples) with that of their antibiotic-free, grass-fed, and organic peers (116 samples in total), grouped under the heading “more sustainable product”. Here's what they found:
The bacterial implications of beef production practices really emerged when researchers tested bacterial strains for antibiotic resistance. Nearly a fifth of conventional minced beef carries bacteria resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics – more than twice the number found in samples “more sustainably produced,” and three times the number found in samples from outdoor-grown cows eating grass.
The article offers a lot of information that could explain these differences. As to why almost all minced beef carries fecal bacteria, the slaughter and processing of huge animals is dirty – compacted excreta on the skin or trapped in the intestines can easily move around the carcass. This isn't a big problem for steaks and roasts, because bacteria tend to stay on the surface, so "when you cook them, the outside is likely to get hot enough to kill the microbes. But with ground beef, the bacteria mix with the meat, the contaminating entirely, including what's in the middle of your hamburger. ”
Then there is this problem: “Meat and fat cuts often come from several animals, so the meat of a contaminated cow can end up in many packs of minced beef. ”
As to why conventional production – the 97% source of minced meat from hamburgers, according to CR – is moderately more likely to contain certain bacteria such as E. coli, and much more likely to contain multi-resistant strains, the report provides a detailed overview of different production systems.
Conventional-grown cows start with grass, but spend the last few months of their lives in fattening parks, where they greasy with corn and soy diets, even though "cow digestive systems are not designed to easily treat starch-rich foods like corn and soybean, creating an acidic environment in the digestive tract of cows that can lead to '
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