Granted spring has barely gotten a foothold in many parts of the country, but we're already starting to daydream about summer and burgers on the barbecue!
Many of us like a good medium-rare burger: piping hot, crispy and savory on the outside, juicy and pink in the middle.
But with all the beef recalls and slaughterhouse scares of the last few months, we're wondering if it's time we changed our order.
The primary food safety concern with ground beef is, of course, the E. Coli bacteria. Normally, this bacteria only lives on the outside surface of the meat and is killed when the meat is seared. This is why it's perfectly fine to order a rare steak without risk of getting sick.
The problem comes when the beef is ground and tissue that was on the surface gets churned together with the interior meat, which effectively disperses any surface bacteria throughout all of the meat.
To be safe, all ground meat needs to be cooked to 155-degrees Fahrenheit in order to kill all bacteria.
If you're really craving a rare burger or just want to reduce your risk of illness, buy your meat from reputed vendors (like local and organic farmers) where you are sure they are maintaining safe slaughtering practices. Risk is also reduced if you grind your own meat at home right before you cook it. You can do this with a Cuisinart meat grinder attachment or even with a few pulses in your food processor.
When eating out, we're edging on the side of caution and have started ordering our burgers cooked medium. When we're eating at a fine dining establishment where they either grind their own meat in-house or buy meat from local farms, we feel a bit safer asking for some pink on the inside.
What do you think?
(Image Credit: ehow.com)
5 Things Paris Taught Me About Travel
Recipe: Ham, Cheddar & Chive Egg Bakes
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Bacsac Bacsquare 04...
Apartment Therapy's Sofa Shopping Guide
Nikki’s Sweet and Cheery Print Studio
Under Maryland law, restaurants have to cook hamburgers to at least medium. At home, I'll go to medium-rare. I'm not worried about getting sick, I just think rare ground beef has a too-mushy texture. Mind you, I've eaten it raw. When I was a teenager, my mom would sometimes fix a "cannibal sandwich" for the two of us -- raw ground beef and raw onion on rye bread.
Unless you know where that beef came from or you are eating at a restaurant which only serves organic food, order it at least medium. Something nasty about rare burgers...especially if its from your standard mass produced cow
Rare steak is one thing, but I've never been one for rare hamburger meat. The texture is a little unnerving to me.
I'm not sure why you think local or organic cows are better. By my understanding they all go to the same slaughterhouses, they don't kill them on the farm and the reality is that the intestine is a large and very thin organ it takes nothing to damage it leaking the intestinal contents all over your meat, thus every meat product should be considered to be contaminated externally. So grinding your own hamburger from steak at home is not any safer than anyone else per se its just that you have a smaller sample size. The more meat you grind in one batch the greater the odds of getting a contaminated piece. That being said, most beef is pretty clean when you culture it while almost all chicken is contaminated. Take your own risks as you will but don't feed undercooked anything to kids under five it is often lethal for them to contract EHEC or other E. coli.
sally599, you brought up a lot of points that i was going to ask about (organic being better, etc). Also, i have to question the suggestion above about grinding your own meat right before you cook it... isn't the idea that the surface bacteria are going to be distributed throughout the meat the part that's dangerous, since the interior of the meat is unlikely to get fully cooked. How does timing play into this? The surface bacteria will get into the insides whether you grind it right before cooking or a week before cooking.
Concerned about the health risks of meat? Veganism is a healthy and sustainable lifestyle that preserves the lives of innocent caring creatures and keeps you from getting any of those nasty degenerative neurological problems that comes from eating cow poo tainted flesh.
The FDA's control over the Meat Processing business in America is completely run by the Meat Processing companies themselves. This means that if a Slaughterhouse produces more product by running an unsanitary and unsafe facility, the FDA will only look at the output quantity and forego the safety/cleanliness simply because they are run by Slaughterhouse Bigwigs.
If I were an Aware, Body Conscious American citizen, I would think twice before eating rare or medium rare ground beef. You would be surprised at how much crap (literally, Feces) gets into American ground beef. I would never eat ground beef processed in any major American processing facility without it being cooked to an internal temperature of 170 degrees F. If you are eating mass produced ground beef rare or medium rare and you haven't experienced any illness because of it, consider yourself lucky.
If rare ground beef is the only thing you like, then purchase your ground beef from local farmers who raise their own cattle and process their own meat. Not only will you be helping local business (and the little man), but you'll be consuming a lot CLEANER meat without the added growth hormones.
There are indeed smaller slaughterhouses that local farmers can use and that put more care into how animals are butchered. These smaller places are growing increasingly rare, though, so it's important to support them as well!
Also, grass-fed cows have a more acid-neutral stomach, which is a less friendly environment for harmful strains of e. coli. Therefore, meat from these cows is less likely to have e. coli. Michael Pollan talks about this a lot in his writing.
The idea behind grinding your own meat is that then you have more control over the meat that goes into your burger. Supermarket ground beef is often a mix of the leftover meats from different cows, and often lower-grade cows, as well. The slaughterhouse practices for Prime and Choice-grade beef are more closely monitored (in theory) and therefore beef with those grades are (or should be, in any case) more dependably safe.
Also, if you grind it and then cook it right away, there's less time for any bacteria that IS there to reproduce to illness-causing levels.
Thanks for questioning that. Cooking ground beef to 155-degrees is definitely the safest route.
E. coli does not "normally" live on the surface of meat. It "normally" lives in the colon. The surface of meat is contaminated when it comes into contact with feces.
The problem with E. coli is that it can survive stomach acid, so as few as 10 organisms can make you ill. In contrast, you have to ingest millions of Salmonella to get sick.
We all have E. coli living in our bodies right now. The problem is with a pathogenic strain. There is a close correlation between the emergence of pathogenic E. coli and feeding cows corn.
True, any meat can be contaminated during processing but if you seek out a local source that comes from pasteured cows and is slaughtered onsite, you have a much, much lower risk.
There is no accepted association with the feeding of cows corn and the emergence of an E. coli outbreak. The pathogenic strains of E. coli infect cows without making the cows sick, but they are harmful to humans. So if the cow is not sick there is no indication that it is infectious.
We do not all have E. coli living in us right now, many people are colonized with commensal non-pathogenic E. coli but when cultured, I think about 20% of people came up positive by fecal swab although some of this may be due to poor technique as this is a self-administered procedure. We all do have numerous strains of non-harmful bacteria, the problem is what is a commensal strain for a cow is a pathogen to us.
The only thing that will cut your risk is people not getting intestinal contents on the meat. Depending on your local source they may be either better or worse than a commercial slaughterhouse. All of this is highly regulated by the US government, you can't just kill a cow wherever you want even if you own a farm.
Sally599 - I never said we all have pathogenic E coli in our guts, but E. coli is part of the normal intestinal flora of most warm blooded animals - including humans; in humans, it makes Vitamin K which we need for blood clotting.
And yes, the switch to grain feeding is implicated in the emergence of the highly pathogenic O157:H7 strain. I did not say it was related to an "outbreak." There are a lot of studies to support increased fecal shedding of O157:H7 among grain-fed cattle. Besides, my microbiology professor said so.
lol i heart science go micro majors!
ilovebutter, I have a PhD in microbiology and five years of research work with EHEC and other pathogenic strains of E. coli. If you tell me who your professor is I'd be glad to set the record straight.
Warning grossness ahead.
E. coli is rather surprisingly not found in all people. As part of intro micro labs we normally have the students perform a number of different swabs on themselves including fecal.
When these swabs come back we put them on a special type of agar that selects for gram negative bacteria and then run them through a number of tests to detect bacteria. A few years back people were interested in the source of E. coli during bladder infections, i.e. are the girls infecting themselves with their um , technique? So in addition to having the students run these tests they also got run by professionals and E. coli were only found in a very low percentage of individuals. I don't have the exact percentage but it was something like 20%. Now was this because they didn't use the swabs correctly ----possibly but in some cases we could see stool on the swabs and still did not get E. coli. So my point was that you can't make these kind of generalizations. Not everyone carries E. coli, we all have a wide range of microbial flora, including a number of gram negatives which are metabolically similar to E. coli.
As far as the cows corn/grass, put up a link to the studies you mentioned. I'm curious, but I can't find anything outside of the "journal of dairy science" which isn't exactly a well respected source of information.
sally599, see the following:
Effects of Common Forage Phenolic Acids on Escherichia coli O157:H7 Viability in Bovine Feces
What is interesting is that the reduction in O157:H7 shedding by cattle on the grass diet does not persist, suggesting that a cow accustomed to a grass diet metabolizes more of the phenolic acids that putatively reduce bacterial load. A cow fed corn most of its life would have a reduction in fecal O157:H7 if given a grass diet for a few days before slaughter. So "benefits of hay feeding may disappear as the ruminant animal fully adapts to the hay diet, which may explain these discrepancies." What matters for human health is the amount of O157:H7 shedding at the time the animal is slaughtered, and grass finishing seems beneficial, to me.
This study was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology and not Journal of Dairy Science, you'll be happy to learn.
Also, see this abstract from Science. I would have to agree with ilovebutter and her/his professor. The studies on grass vs. corn diets are out there, if you look for them.
I hope I'm not tempting fate by posting this, but I've been eating rare steak and burgers for years and I've never had an issue.
Hi Sally - I'm a nutritional sciences major; PhD in micro wins. :) My micro professor stated that when we shifted cows from pasture to grass about 25 or so years, the change in diet caused physiologic stress to the animal (altered stomach pH, depressed immune system) which gave rise to the emergence of O157. We've discussed animal feeding practices and the effect on food content/quality in some of my nutrition classes. It's very interesting, and I'm a vocal proponent of feeding an animal (including humans) their wild type diet. Because of this, I do tend to make generalizations so I appologize. Feeding corn to cows really gets me riled up!
We did that lab in micro... Ew. Most of the class tested negative for E. coli but I think the students (myself included) did a half-assed swab (so to speak).
I've been eating rare and raw beef (including ground beef) right from the grocery store for over 30 years. I also eat raw eggs and sushi. No wonder people get sick all the time these days, they do not expose their systems to all the germs and bacteria that have always existed around us and therefore they fail to build up and maintain a healthy tolerance. I'm also a nail biter, which gives me my daily does of all the nasty things that exist out there. I got sick once back around 1989 from eating raw eggs, but that's when I was much younger and my system was still weak and uneducated. Enjoy your over processed, over cooked, tasteless food -- I'll stick with the natural flavor raw food has to offer.
I just ate a rare hamburger I panfried here at Stacey's house. I put jalepenos, american cheese, ketchup and yellow mustard on it. It was good to me! It was enough for a man!