SubscribeIn the wake of the outbreak, the U.S.D.A. reminded consumers on its Web site that hamburgers had to be cooked to 160 degrees to be sure any E. coli is killed and urged them to use a thermometer to check the temperature. This reinforced Sharon Smith’s concern that she had sickened her daughter by not cooking the hamburger thoroughly.
But the pathogen is so powerful that her illness could have started with just a few cells left on a counter. “In a warm kitchen, E. coli cells will double every 45 minutes,” said Dr. Mansour Samadpour, a microbiologist who runs IEH Laboratories in Seattle, one of the meat industry’s largest testing firms.
With help from his laboratories, The Times prepared three pounds of ground beef dosed with a strain of E. coli that is nonharmful but acts in many ways like O157:H7. Although the safety instructions on the package were followed, E. coli remained on the cutting board even after it was washed with soap. A towel picked up large amounts of bacteria from the meat.
Contaminated peanuts? Forty-two Minnesotans were reported sick compared with three Kentuckians. Jalapeño peppers last year? Thirty-one in Minnesota and two in Kentucky became ill. The different numbers arise because health officials in Kentucky and many other states fail to investigate many complaints of food-related sickness while those in Minnesota do so diligently, safeguarding not only Minnesotans but much of the rest of the country, as well.
world meat production has risen fivefold since 1970-but most of the increase has been in the "poor" countries. China’s meat consumption, for example, doubled in the 1990s because China’s family incomes have soared. Even in "vegetarian" India, three-fourths of the Hindus say they will eat meat (but not beef) when they can afford it.Long live industrial agriculture! Canonize Monsanto!
Modern crop yields are not only the highest in history, but also the most sustainable. Modern farmers have conservation tillage, which eliminates "bare-earth" farming techniques like plowing. It cuts soil erosion by up to 90 percent, often with higher yields because it can double the soil moisture available to the crop plants.
[...]if corporations didn’t take 80 million tons of natural nitrogen from the air each year to fertilize crops, we’d need the organic N from 9 billion cattle instead of the 1.2 billion the world has now. Growing feed for that massive number of cattle might force us to plow down another 30 to 50 billion acres of wildlands.
If corporations didn’t make pesticides, we’d lose half of our crop production to pests and have to clear billions more acres of wildlands for cropland.
we should not allow the world’s current food situation to persist. Most of the world’s poorly fed people are hungry because we haven’t yet extended high-yield farming and high-paying off-farm jobs to the whole globe. Some 800 million people are not getting adequate nutrition consistently.
Andrew wrote:
Dear DJ,
You are clearly trying to provide good accurate info here so I commend you. However you have admitted in he discussion that you got your rice production figures out by a factor of 1000 (since the data was in THOUSANDS of CWT not just CWT - as pointed out by "Matt"). So please could you correct your headline figure for Rice of 276 and maybe put a range based on the other calcs you have done (eg 0.25-2). There are a number of articles out there on the web that use your article as a source eg http://www.loleegreen.com/2009/04/food-for-thought-carbon-footprint-of-rice/ all of which just glibly pass on this error that rice emissons are higher than beef pound for pound when actually the opposite is true. Thank you in advance. Regards
Reply to this
1. 7/5/2009 6:50 PM DJ wrote:
Andrew,
I have acknowledged that my figure was in error. However, I cannot "correct" it because I can't pin down an accurate number. As best I can determine at this time, CO2 emissions for rice are somewhere between ,5 and 36 pounds per pound-- an absurdly large range, much of which is still greater than beef.
I have contacted several experts, all of whom acknowledge the discrepancy in the available figures, but none of whom have yet been able to provide a resolution for that disrepancy. As soon as I get an answer (assuming I'm comfortable with its factuality), I will post it and correct my earlier posts. I will also do my best to track down those who have quoted me and advise them of the correct figures.
As far as I'm concerned, for the time being-- and for longer than I had hoped now-- there are no correct figures. I hope to find a solution soon.
You do realise that this sort of choice is a luxury, yes? More than 10% of American families live in poverty. When you are trying to feed a family of four below the poverty line, the choice is not between King's and the butcher; it's between $1.99 ground beef and running out of money before the end of the month.So much for the argument that industrialized agriculture allows poor people to afford meat. If that's really the case, they surely are doing an hell of a job, if more than 30 million people have "a choice" between malnutrition and running the risk of industrially induced mutated bacteria infection. Not to mention health care, yet bovines in their short lives probably get more medical attention then you.
Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.We often hear stories of enormous retailers using their enormous relevance to cram special considerations down their suppliers' throats. Wal-Mart is the poster child for this sort of power, but supermarkets in general have lorded their position over their suppliers for a long time, even going so far as to charge them for the privilege of occupying shelf space in some cases.So why would an enormous and powerful company like Cargill (Wikipedia claims it's the largest privately held firm in the US) kowtow to its suppliers in this way? Why aren't companies in Cargill's position the ones dictating the testing policies? Cargill buys meat from a zillion different sources; why isn't their relationship with their suppliers more along the lines of "You will test your meat and you will somehow do it cheap. We will test your meat too. If you don't like it, too bad; you need us more than we need you."
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Tracing her burger shows why eating ground beef is still a gamble
hmmm...
Tracing her burger shows why eating uncooked ground beef is still a gamble
FTFY
posted by scrutiny at 7:55 AM on October 4