# Food safety..or where's the beef!



## carverman (Nov 8, 2010)

Big nationwide recall on prepackaged frozen packaged meat hamburger patties by the CFIA. E-Coli found in some packages traced back to a meat processing plant in Saskatchewan (New Food Classics) that ran into receivership problems and shut down.
President's choice packaged meats (Blue Menu) is on the list of frozen meat from this plant.
One reported case of food poisoning from these products.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/0...frozen-beef-across-canada-food-safety-expert/

Plant shut down on Feb 21st due to other issues. Wonder if any disgruntled workers knowing the plant was about to
close, would have tampered with the integrity of the product(s), knowing their jobs were to be lost,
or if it was just bad hygiene at the plant/processing equipment.

These days, even with the safety seals on food, you can't completely eliminate tampering at the plant before the seals
go on the food..so the tamper proof seals only give you a "warm feeling" that nobody in the handling or retail area
tampered with the food. 

That's a LOT of frozen hamburger! Remembering the post of a forum user getting that Taco Belle "experience"
wonder if Taco Belle got any of their meat products from this plant.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

Hamburger in general is one of the riskiest food items to consume, not because of tampering but because the risk of bacterial infection is higher. We almost never buy it -- if I want hamburger I buy some chuck or lean beef, cut it into cubes, and toss the cubes into the food processor for a minute. It takes five minutes and the result is better than any ground beef you can buy in the store anyway.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

carverman how about something like this. You can continue reporting National Scandals, if you insist.

but then after each lurid story you have to rotate 180 degrees & report a positive. People helping other people. Little boys on scooters. Little girls in flowered sun hats. Springtime. Puppies.


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## jamesbe (May 8, 2010)

Ate my Lick's burgers from the recall list last night... LOL We had the other two from the box a few weeks ago so I think I'm good.


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## carverman (Nov 8, 2010)

humble_pie said:


> carverman how about something like this. You can continue reporting National Scandals, if you insist.
> 
> but then after each lurid story you have to rotate 180 degrees & report a positive. People helping other people. Little boys on scooters. Little girls in flowered sun hats. Springtime. Puppies.


Hmmm..you KNOW that wouldn't work on this kind of forum, HP. 

Scandals and general human (indifference, cruelty, greed, stupidity, or ignorance) is what consists of most of the "interesting" news items these days. Sunshine, lollipops and roses just don't cut it as news worthy stories.

Killing animals for food has been a long time tradition with humans as we are on top of the food chain because we have invented very effective ways of slaughtering them and ourselves. For instance, we drive while intoxicated in a vehicle and killing another human who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is somthing animals don't have to even consider...with them if they are hungry and possess <venom, teeth, claws, beaks, talons), they don't need to invent bombs and politically influenced motives to do others in.

back to the contaminated pre-packaged meats:
People shopping in grocery stores have been accustomed to buying wrapped and attractively packaged meat products. They don't know what goes on in the background of processing those meat products. Contamination can get in, and because the stores are afraid of class action lawsuits these days, they just pull all the products listed on the recall. 

Now where does all that frozen food go?......into a slurry for dog and cat food! Some pet food manufacturers mention "animal digest' on the ingredients of the label. 
I fed my cat PC finick cat cat food for a while last year and she got very sick because of it.
Cost me several hundred in vet bills and the vets couldn' really determine what the problem was, but prescribed anti-biotics
anyway.


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## carverman (Nov 8, 2010)

jamesbe said:


> Ate my Lick's burgers from the recall list last night... LOL We had the other two from the box a few weeks ago so I think I'm good.


Well..apparently, not all the frozen burger products from the closed plant were contaminated. Some were, but most were not, but the CFIA decided to be on the safe side to recall all of the products from the plant nationwide, because it was cheaper to do it that way than to individual test batches from each branded product for the contamination based on batch/production numbers.

One person did get sick and it was diagnosed as an e-coli infection, but we have e-coli and other bacteria in our digestive systems normally, so who knows if that person got actually sick from eating a boxed product..but if he/she did eat the food and got sick as a result, it would be assumed that the bacteria came from the frozen hamburger..even if the hamburger was left on the counter to defrost for a few hours. 

One of our forum members got sick after eating tacos at Taco Belle. That meat slurry they use in the filling "sludge pot" sitting under warming lights for many hours each day, probably has a better chance of growing bacteria than in a frozen burger, but the question here is ...do bacteria survive freezer temperatures?


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

Mark Bittman has easy instructions on how to grind your own beef for burgers in the "Notes" section to this recipe:

http://www.culinate.com/content/2770/The+Basic+Burger

The main thing to keep in mind is to not over-grind it, otherwise you'll be eating a hockey puck.

If you don't have a food processor and want to impress your friends, you can chop by hand. Here's a glorious description by John McPhee from "Brigade de Cuisine" (although note that eating bits of the raw meat as you cut it is a little risky!):

"I asked him to make me a hamburger. He removed from the refrigerator the hundredth part of a ton of beef, sliced off a portion, put the rest of the meat back in the cooler, and returned to his working block, where his wrist began to flutter heavily, and in thirty seconds he had disassembled the chunk of beef and rearranged it as an oval patty. He ate some of the meat as he worked. Fast as it all happened, the cutting was done in three phases. He began with a one-handed rocking motion, and then held down the point of the knife with his left hand while pumping the handle with his right. He ended with a chopping motion, as if the knife were a hatchet. As he made the patty, he did not compact it crudely in his hands like a snowball. He tapped it together with the flat of the knife."


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

thanks for the links brad.

I never considered it myself until now, perhaps now I will feel good about cooking and serving medium done burgers now. Although I've never been much of a burger fan. Anything that takes fewer than 3 hours to cook in the barbecue isn't going to taste as good.


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## carverman (Nov 8, 2010)

brad said:


> If you don't have a food processor and want to impress your friends, you can chop by hand. Here's a glorious description by John McPhee from "Brigade de Cuisine" (although note that eating bits of the raw meat as you cut it is a little risky!):
> 
> "I asked him to make me a hamburger. He removed from the refrigerator the hundredth part of a ton of beef, sliced off a portion, put the rest of the meat back in the cooler, and returned to his working block, where his wrist began to flutter heavily, and in thirty seconds he had disassembled the chunk of beef and rearranged it as an oval patty. *He ate some of the meat as he worked. Fast as it all happened, the cutting was done in three phases. He began with a one-handed rocking motion, and then held down the point of the knife with his left hand while pumping the handle with his right. He ended with a chopping motion, as if the knife were a hatchet. As he made the patty, he did not compact it crudely in his hands like a snowball. He tapped it together with the flat of the knife.*"


A very artistic approach at chopping meat, Brad. 
Did he juggle the knife in mid-air like the Japanese restaurant "food artists" do?
I once went to one of these and it was entertaining to see them prepare the meal in front of your eyes.

Good AAA beef, at least the one they use for t-bone steaks is hung in a cooler for several days at a certain temperature to age and tenderize on it's own. While I can eat a good steak rare, I can't do the same with a hamburger, even a fresh one that I have made myself. The thing I find with any of the ground lean beef patties is that the taste is rather "dry" unless you mix in a bit of fatty meat with it. It's like the best steaks are the ones that have the marbelized fat throughout..much more flavour on the BBQ.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

carverman said:


> A very artistic approach at chopping meat, Brad.
> Did he juggle the knife in mid-air like the Japanese restaurant "food artists" do?


No, this guy wasn't fancy, but he was a great chef. His real identity (McPhee refers to him as "Otto") was kept secret because he had a small restaurant (maximum capacity 55) and wanted to keep it that way...he was worried that McPhee's article would bring hordes of snobby New York gourmets to his door. McPhee starts the article by saying that the 20 or 30 best meals he's ever eaten anywhere were cooked by this chef, who was trained primarily in Switzerland and Spain. He was a world-class chef, but was not above eating junk food; he proclaimed the Egg McMuffin a triumph although he said the Big Mac was barely edible.


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## andrewf (Mar 1, 2010)

Fascinating, brad. Thanks for sharing!

In my book, hamburger needs to be thoroughly, 100% cooked. If you do this, I don't think the risk is excessive (crossing the street is far riskier and you do that almost every day). To a certain extent you need to have some trust in the food supply chain, unless you grow and process all of your food from scratch, from soil that you have tested and are sure is free of contaminants, etc.


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