E. coli and meat?!
Answers: What exactly makes ground meat more likely to be contaminated with bacteria like e. coli? I'm reading "Toxin" by Robin Cook. I'm sure it will be covered later in the book, but it's driving me nuts. I know you guys aren't meat eaters, but figured you would know more about it than anyone else. Thanks!
They use every part of the cow for the ground beef. OK, here is the dirty little secret about e. coli. It is ONLY found in feces and urine. So, when a cow gets butchered, intestines and other organ meat that contain e. coli get ground up in the meat.
This is why steaks in restaurants can be served rare. E. coli is not found on these cuts of meat because steaks don't have feces on it. Ground beef, according to the health department, needs to be cooked to 155 F in order to kill this bacteria. Steaks on the other hand, can be served at 130 F, which is NOT hot enough to kill e. coli and it is perfectly acceptable (according to health department rules).
Be careful of produce, too. Sprouts are very susceptible to e. coli. The way the seeds are sprouted transfers e. coli from the soil into the sprouts.
Other produce can be contaminate from flood water. Remember the spinach a couple of years back that was contaminated? That particular spinach field was flooded with water that was not potable. This is a big no-no in farming. I don't know why they didn't catch this mistake.
Animals can also urinate on produce. Odwalla Juice had a contamination problem in their apple juice back in the 90's. Apple pickers were picking apples off the ground that had been urinated on by deer. Odwalla now pasteurizes all of its juice that it sells.
e-coli gets in meat when the cow is slaughtered, they hang cows upside down and take a knive and cut their chest open. if the knive accidentally cuts too deep it can knick the intestines, feces can spill into the meat. e-coli = cow poop.. that is why you ALWAYS cook meat to at least 165degrees F. at this temperature, the bacteria is reduced to an accptable level. but there is still small amounts :(
like the person above me said, some vegetables and fruits are recently being contaminated because of fertalizer. farmers use cow poop to help make plants grow right? well the plants absorb that poop and make them contaminated with ecoli as well.
Handling a raw piece of meat has often been compared to handling raw sewerage.
E. coli comes from fecal contamination. So, if you're buying a steak, any e. coli contamination would be on the outer surface and would be cooked away with even a small amount of cooking. When you take scraps of beef from dozens or even hundreds of cows, the chances that some of them are contaminated with e. coli is fairly high, although it's still only on the outside (because, again, of contact with feces.) When you then grind up all these scraps, the e. coli gets mixed throughout the meat. Now formerly clean meat is contaminated AND the bacteria are spread through the meat instead of only on the outer surface. Hamburger has to been cooked more thoroughly because the bacteria is in the middle of the meat, too.