All About Food: How to ensure your hamburger meat is safe

The great American hamburger is a staple of our cuisine.

This year, Americans bought 4.6 billion pounds of beef. However, the meat has come under scrutiny.

Consumer Reports recently featured an article based on the testing of 300 packages of ground beef purchased in stores across the country, and the findings were not pretty. High amounts of bacteria were found; 40% of the samples contained staph and 20% had a kind of bacteria linked to food poisoning.

Of those 4.6 billion pounds of beef, half was in the form of ground beef. All of the 458 pounds of ground beef tested had some fecal contamination. This was from conventionally raised beef. Also discovered were super bugs — those that are resistant to two or more classes of antibiotics.

Cows are first left to eat grass, but they spend their final months living on feedlots so they can be fattened up with a diet of corn and soybeans. However, their digestive systems don’t easily process high-starch foods, and an acidic environment is created in the cows’ digestive systems that can lead to ulcers and infections.

In order to rev up their sugar intake, they also get fed candy like gummie bears and chocolate. This becomes a substitute for the fiber they would otherwise get in grass. The feed they receive may have slaughterhouse parts from hogs or chicken in it, as well as dried manure and litter from the barns.

The cows will also receive a low dose of antibiotics to prevent infections and stimulate faster growth.

All ground beef has some fecal bacteria in it. The way in which large animals are processed is very messy. Fecal matter caked on the hide or trapped in intestines can move to the carcass.

That problem is not as bad if you are cooking steaks or roasts because the bacteria sticks to the outside surface, and when the meat is cooked, the heat will kill the bugs. Ground beef is a different story. The beef is, most often, not from a single animal but rather a mash-up of many cows. One lone burger may contain meat from two to 20 different animals.

Any raw meat will have some bacteria, and grinding the meat into hamburger mixes it with the contaminants from the outside.

So what can you do ensure that your hamburger meat is safe? Buy grass-fed beef, which has only 6% of the bad stuff compared with 18% in conventional ground beef. The grass-fed method of raising the cattle shuns antibiotics, but the beef is going to cost more than the conventional product.

One of the most important ways to safely eat burgers is to cook them to a temperature of 160 degrees or until the meat is no longer pink. A meat thermometer is helpful in determining when the meat is safely ready to eat.

Ground beef can keep in the freezer for a long time if it is wrapped in foil or a freezer bag, but once defrosted, it will be good in the refrigerator for only one or two days — or three or four after it has been cooked. You can put it in the microwave to defrost, but cook it right after that.

Finally, I want to say that more and more experts are recommending that people eat red meat no more than once a week.

TERRY MARKOWITZ was in the gourmet food and catering business for 20 years. She can be reached for comments or questions at [email protected].