Put Down That Burger
Topps expands beef recall because of possible E. Coli contamination in its frozen hamburger patties. Topps set up a toll-free recall help line at (888) 734-0451
- 21.7 million pounds of ground beef recalled
- Products have ‘sell by,’ ‘best if used by’ date between 9/25/07 through 9/25/08
- Recalled products have a USDA establishment number of EST 9748
The patties are sold under the names: Butcher’s Best, Kohler Foods, Mike’s, Pathmark, Rastelli’s, Roma, Sam’s Choice, Sand Castle, Shop Rite, Topps, and Westside.
Even if you don’t buy these evil things directly, you usually get them in restaurants.
Let the cows eat grass. Cows that eat grass do not develop the dangerous form of E. coli: their digestive track kills it. It comes from grain-fed beef cattle.
42 comments
If people would just try grass fed beef and get over the expectations they have we would be a lot better off and so would the cows. You pretty much get grass fed beef in Europe (except where they import it from the U.S.) and while it does take a little getting used to it is much tastier and less fatty than grain finished beef. You get the added benefit of eating meat from a cow that had a natural diet and was happy. The grain feed beef are made sick from the grain as they are meant to eat grass and their digestive systems can’t effectively deal with the grain and whatever else they are forced to eat. Naturally they die unhappy and tortured. Not good and not good for you.
Grain-fed lacks texture and taste. The purpose of grain feeding is to add weight quickly and reduce the land required. The land used becomes a cesspool incubating diseases in addition to E. coli, which has lead to the overuse of antibiotics, which to even nastier bugs.
Grain feeding is another short-term, unsustainable method of production that wastes resources. Pasturing is just a better farming technique for long-term sustainable production for either dairy or beef.
The Solution
There is a tested, effective approach to the problem of antibiotic resistance: simply phase out the use of antibiotics as routine animal feed additives. Invoking the precautionary principle, our European neighbors have shown that such a phaseout can make a significant difference. For example, Denmark began phasing out additives in the early 1990s. Between 1994 and 2001, antibiotic use in the Danish meat production industry decreased 54%.21 During the same period, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus was virtually eliminated from the Danish poultry industry with no change in the price of meat (Figure 4). Avoparcin, a vancomycin analogue, was one of the antibiotics phased out and was the presumed source of the vancomycin resistance.18,20 Effective January 1, 2006, the European Union banned the use of all remaining classes of antibiotics as growth promoters.22
Today’s children have resistance to almost nothing which is probably responsible for a rise in allergies and asthma. Our antiseptic world is yielding unprotected people.
May I suggest Hearst Ranch beef…
Welcome to the Hearst Ranch Store. Since 1865, the Hearst family has raised cattle on the rich sustainable native grasslands of the Central California coast. Hearst Cattle are grass-fed and grass-finished and humanely raised. Our animals are not given growth hormones or antibiotics, ever. The result is beef with extraordinary flavor that’s as memorable and natural as the surrounding landscape.
http://www.hearstranch.com/store/pages.php?pageid=22
I’m in favor of locally grown everything, so you know what you’re eating. When things come wrapped in plastic you have no idea what’s been done to it. I really miss not having a local dairy. Half the time I have to pour milk out that has gone sour days before the label indicates because it sat out somewhere in the heat while it was being transported.
I sometimes wonder if they are freezing it and defrosting it in the store.
It just keeps happening, again and again. Why am I not surprised.
Didn’t Frances Moore Lappé teach us the virtues of grass-fed cattle over 30 years ago? Few seem to have learned that lesson. I never expected that, 30+ years later, it could be downright difficult to find such cattle in the market.
There’s irony here: I became a vegetarian originally for the smaller “footprint” on the planet’s resources. By now, my own eating habits are well settled, but there certainly seem to be few people (veggie or carnivore, and as you know, I do not proselytize one over the other) who have ever given a thought to the matter of how their diet affects themselves or their environment.
I really miss fresh food. If you have ever eaten really fresh food there is no substitute. Having worked in a canning factory I can tell you that some of the premium labels wanted only the first canning of the day, the stuff that had just arrived and was put in a can within two hours because it would definitely be less that 8 hours from picking. It does make a difference in taste.
I have had food poisoning once, and it is worse than any hangover you can imagine, and I take it personally that it happened in the US, not eating street food in “less developed nations” all over the world.
it really does last longer in the refrigerator. i drink it days past the expiration date. unfortunately, it’s not local.
i do have a local source for cheese though. their garlic blue deserves its cult status.
You have to check to see if it’s a “sell by” or a “use by” date. It should be good past the “sell by” date, but iffy if it’s past its “use by” date. I was pouring it out before the “sell by” date indicating it wasn’t being kept under refrigeration before it was put out for sale.
it doesn’t say, but i think i remember reading somewhere that the sell-by date is mandatory on fresh foods and the use-by date is optional.
either way, i love this brand. i can buy a carton with a date on it that’s a couple of weeks into the future, and regularly drink it even a week past the date. not so with “industrial” milk, which i could only find a few days ahead of its expiration date, and never dared drink it more than a day or two past that.
Doctor Sanjay Gupta would beg to disagree, or at least, report otherwise.
Hipparchia, I am a big fan of the Organic Family products as well. There is another good brand Nancy’s that does a good job especially on cottage cheese, yogurt and kefir. As to Dr. Gupta I get the impression that there is an agenda there that we are unaware of and know for a fact that some of his recommendations are contrary to scientific opinion. His response to M.Moore’s Sicko is a good guide.
I don’t remember any great rush to finish the “family” milk kept in a separate container in the spring house on my uncles’ dairy farms. It was raw milk chilled by the spring water flowing into a tank. You had to stir it or scoop off the cream, but it didn’t go bad like the pasteurized, homogenized, packed in plastic stuff you buy in supermarkets.
Dr. Gupta works for his corporation, not for the public. He says what will please his corporate masters, not what the science reports. I’m sure he can find “designer” research to support his position, but he has no credibility with me.
The Shrubbery pretty much drove a stake through the mystique of the Ivy League graduate.
I think raw milk will turn to cheese if you let it sit, which doesn’t seem like necessarily a bad thing at all…
If you want to make cheese you have to work a little harder than that, but that is part of the process.
Sure, once it curdles, you have to separate it and keep it cool… The point is it isn’t ruined like homogenized milk, which is useless once it goes bad.
Is any society in the world as divorced from nature and more synthetic-based than America?
their website tells me that i can find nancy’s at my local co-op. i’ll look for it next time i go shopping. my favorite yogurt so far.
To make good cheese you need the right “starter” which is a yeast normally that produces the cheese you want. Occasionally the “starter” is contained in the local air, which is the reason some cheeses are only made in certain areas. More often it is in the dairy animals that are used.
Pasteurization kills the “good bacteria” as well as the bad, which is why you need raw milk for cheese.
Where I live (Berkeley) we get good starters for bread. I haven’t made cheese but I did some baking.
The lack of good starter is why what they call “sourdough” sucks outside of northern California, and what they call “Jewish rye” sucks outside of New York. It is also the secret to great cheese. Anyone can make good cheese, but you need the right microbes for the really exceptional stuff as well as the proper forage for the dairy herd.
Sourdough. Is there any other bread? 😉
It all depends on what it is used for. I wouldn’t recommend it for peanut butter and strawberry preserves.
My sourdough was sweet, not sour.
It was a complex starter, though.
The key is that it had flavor and character, something that is sadly lacking from most bread these days. Anyone who eats anything on commercial white bread has no idea what a sandwich can taste like.
It had more than flavor and character, actually. It was something quite extraordinary.
I absolutely agree with you, Bryan. We are lacking in things like pure water and real bread and wonder why people get sick, synthetic nutrition.
Good bread recipe.
I’d love to see what happens if you try that in Florida.
Choose your favorite herb.
We suffer from a lack of real ingredients unless you buy on the ‘Net. Buying food mail-order is not progress.
You can get local grapes that haven’t been dosed in pesticides or irradiated that were made in to raisins which means they probably have wild yeasts on them. Almost everything we have available locally is processed. The vegetables are more apt to be from Mexico than South Florida and they were probably picked green.
i don’t know if that recipe works here in florida or not, whig, but i can tell you that when i tried it back when i was living in the cold frozen north, my friends stole it, painted it, glued it to a piece of plywood, and awarded it to some poor undeserving soul as an anti-trophy.
I’ve heard of it working in Vermont. I think it has a lot to do with how polluted your air is, and where the air is coming from.
It’s manna, you know.
Also you can’t use mineralized water, you need to purify it. Distilled (or reverse osmosis should work) water is necessary.
If the people can’t get bread, we can’t do much to restore civilization, now can we? This is important stuff.
If all else fails you can ultimately adopt a commercial yeast, and feed it for awhile to make it your own starter.
People spent 40 years in the desert looking for a yeast. You know?
You need good water and good food for your own bodies, for that matter.
Bread is the staff of life.
it wasn’t distilled water, so maybe that was the problem. also, this was in the land of the feral hemp, so maybe the yeasties were just too laid back. 🙂
Hemp is a good addition to your starter if you have it, actually, putting aside legal considerations. Like hops, it’s protective of good yeast against undesirable bacteria. At least the potent kind is.