Well, That's Disturbing

Dangerous Intersection links to a New York Times story about E. coli and hamburger.

It has some good (though not appetizing) information about the food chain involved in getting beef from various slaughterhouses to various processing plants, usually in bits and pieces from many different animals.

The part about how shreds of fat are treated with ammonia to kill bacteria before being added to the mix struck me as especially appealing. Yum?

I'm not really one to be wildly grossed out about the details of how stuff gets to be food. Yeah, if you eat meat, there's blood involved. And other stuff that naturally follows from the biological processes of animals.

And meat or no, there are bugs (like in your wine). Dirt. Ants get into things. There are mice everywhere.

You do the best you can, but you can't get totally obsessed. If I drop my sandwich on the floor, I'll probably pick it up and eat it anyway. After all, it's most likely peanut butter, and I don't want to miss that.

On the other hand, there's at least a perceived difference between eating a possibly dusty floor sandwich, and enjoying delicious bits of fat washed with ammonia. Even though it may not actually be literally the same ammonia my mom used to get in the big gallon jugs and use to scrub the floor, which is my first association. Or maybe it is.

Industrial food is just hard to oversee. I can tell if my floor is too gross to eat off (well, not really, it could be crawling with E. coli and I couldn't see them, but I feel I can know where my floor has been, and what's been on my floor), but who can tell with factories and processing plants?

I'm sure they're generally cleaner than a lot of kitchens, but when they're not, the potential effects can go far and wide. Way farther and wider than anything that comes off my germ-riddled floor.

So yeah, I'm not advocating shrieking in horror and vowing to subsist only on sterilized flour and beans individually scrubbed with ammonia and lye, but it it seems like it can't hurt to know more about the way stuff gets to be food.

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