Shutterstock
Love me a good ground beef burger patty, tossed on a hot grill, eaten between a couple slices of bun and some cheese.
Don’t love me a bunch of deadly bacteria. I don’t think anyone does.
Unfortch, according to a Consumer Reports study, you can’t have one without the other. That’s because every package of ground beef in the world tested positive for nasty bacteria like E. coli, enterococcus, salmonella, and staphylococcus aureus. Whatever those are. Bacteria should have easier names. Like Tom.
And, okay. Not every single pound of ground beef tested positive for bacteria, since testing the 4.6 billion we consume every year would be quite impossible, but every package CR did look at was full of nasty cow crap and the foul things that come with it.
We purchased 300 packages—a total of 458 pounds (the equivalent of 1,832 quarter-pounders)—from 103 grocery, big-box, and natural food stores in 26 cities across the country. We bought all types of ground beef: conventional—the most common type of beef sold, in which cattle are typically fattened up with grain and soy in feedlots and fed antibiotics and other drugs to promote growth and prevent disease—as well as beef that was raised in more sustainable ways, which have important implications for food safety and animal welfare.
The results were sobering. All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that signified fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or nontoxin-producing E. coli), which can cause blood or urinary tract infections. Almost 20 percent contained C. perfringens, a bacteria that causes almost 1 million cases of food poisoning annually. Ten percent of the samples had a strain of S. aureus bacteria that can produce a toxin that can make you sick. That toxin can’t be destroyed—even with proper cooking.
CHUMP AWAY. On deadly butt drippings. Burgers and deadly butt drippings. A little BDBD never hurt no one. Aside from all the people these bacteria have killed.
Which is a lot.
Fucking Tom.
[H/T Esquire]