The Trouble With Beef

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Big Beef’s Hometown Paper Digs Up Dirt

There’s truth in the clichéd joke that the Midwest is home to more cattle than people. In Kansas, with a population of 2.8 million human residents, there are 2.6 million beef cattle on industrial feedlots.

Unlike human inhabitants, the cows aren’t there to live out long lives on the prairie; they’re there for slaughter. Four of the seven largest beef slaughterhouses in America are in Kansas, the leading meat processing state in the country. Each of those houses can kill up to 6,000 cattle per day. The Kansas City Star spent a year investigating the beef industry and dug up a slew of scary results, concluding in a report this week that Big Beef is “a bonanza with hidden dangers.”

The meat industry is churning out meat at unprecedented rates: Twenty-six billion pounds of beef from 34 million cattle are produced in the U.S. every year, more than any other country in the world. While Janet Riley, senior vice president for public affairs at the American Meat Institute, has hailed the beef industry’s production as “a miracle,” food-safety advocates beg to differ. Big Beef's breakneck pace of production is a threat to public safety, opponents say. These facts from the Star’s report suggest that isn’t an overstatement.

Photo: Bill Snead/Getty Images

More Tender, Less Safe

In a home kitchen, tenderizing a steak is typically done with a mallet adorned with points that pierce the surface of the meat. In the beef industry, however, tenderization involves moving meat through machines with automated double-edged blades that shred the meat’s muscle fibers and connective tissues. Sometimes the industry also uses hollow needles to inject the meat with flavorings.

The process helps the meat industry market tougher cuts, but it can hurt consumers. “Although blading and injecting marinades into meat add value for the beef industry, that also can drive pathogens […] deeper into the meat,” reports The Star, where they often aren’t exposed to temperatures high enough to kill them. All of the big four meat packers—which together slaughter 87 percent of the country’s beef cattle—reported tenderizing their beef at some point during production.

Carlotta Medus, principal epidemiologist for Minnesota’s health department, told The Star that mechanically tenderized meat is linked to foodborne illness outbreaks. “We have seen it [mechanically tenderized meat] as a vehicle for outbreaks since 2003,” she said. “It’s not as risky as ground beef, but it is definitely riskier than an intact steak.

Photo: Adam Gault/Getty Images

Few Labels, Little Guidance

Similar to the food industry’s reluctance to labels genetically modified foods, the beef industry is resisting the use of labels to notify consumers that their meat has been mechanically tenderized and needs to be cooked thoroughly to kill off any and all pathogens. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has encouraged the meat industry to voluntarily label its products with an advisory to cook meat to a safe temperature, but not many beef-processing plants take the suggestion to heart. “The meat associations do not want labeling on their products because they believe that it will cause confusion and reluctance to buy the product,” Pat Buck, cofounder of the Center for Food Borne Illness, tells The Star. Without labels, argued the Conference for Food Protection in 2010, retailers, restaurants, and consumers are in the dark about what they need to do in the kitchen to make meat safe.

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Lower Rates, Farther Reach

Big Beef contends that food-safety practices are improving. And indeed, a USDA study published in March of 2012, which was analyzed by The Star, found that large meat-processing plants had slightly slower rates of positive tests for E. coli between 2007 and 2011 than smaller plants did. But there’s a hitch to the seemingly good news: The same study showed that small plants produced 465,000 pounds of contaminated beef between 2007 and 2011; large plants, however, produced more than 51 million pounds of contaminated beef. As The Star puts it “The volume of meat a plant produces is a key issue.”

Photo: Luis M. Molina/Getty Images

Proper Cooking Is No Guarantee of Safety

Perhaps one of the scariest points to come out of The Star’s report is that even cooking a steak to well-done is no guarantee of safety. Currently, the USDA recommends cooking all beef to an internal temperature of at least 145 degrees, followed by three additional minutes of resting time, during which “cooking” continues, before it is consumed. Cautious food-safety advocates advise cooking beef to a minimum internal temperature of 160 degrees to ensure that any bacteria is killed. But neither number is a magic bullet: The 2011 Journal of Food Protection published an article warning that “cooking highly-contaminated bladed steaks on a gas grill—even at 160 degrees like hamburger—might not kill all E. coli bacteria,” reports The Star. Pathogens that scientists call “fortuitous survivors” can survive thanks to cold spots in the meat

Photo: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

Traceback Is Tough

As the beef industry has grown, production and distribution chains have become increasingly complex, making E. coli outbreaks harder to track. Some plants combine beef from different countries and different cattle into a single product in order to achieve a desired fat content. When a consumer eats contaminated meat derived from multiple sources, figuring out which source carried the contamination is a thorny challenge.

Even Cargill, one of the primary meat producers in the country, admitted the system is broken. “We believe there is room for improvement…that will lead to more timely actions and potentially fewer illnesses,” corporate officials told The Star.

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Big Beef Is Too Big to Manage

Consumers rely on federal agencies to safeguard their food supply, but in the case of Big Beef, regulation is far from rigid. Meat producers—not the government—implement the federal meat-inspection program, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). The program’s inefficacy is so well known within the industry that some federal meat inspectors have cynically repurposed the initials as an acronym for “Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray.” One example of the lax regulations: Meat plants are required to verify that their food-safety systems are effective, but aren’t required to actually test meat. Even if plants want to conduct analysis, no federal testing standards exist. If meat producers do opt to voluntarily test their meat and find pathogens, there’s no requirement to bring the positive results to the government’s attention.

The USDA largely relies on recalls to protect consumers, but federal data suggests recalls aren’t very effective. An analysis by The Star found that, since 2005, nearly 18 million pounds of E. coli-contaminated beef has been recalled, but “recalled” doesn’t necessarily mean “recovered.” Far less than half of that amount was actually accounted for.

Photo: Ed Lallo/Getty Images

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A sucker for sustainable agriculture and a good farmers market, Megan likes writing about food almost as much as eating it. If you don't want to know what's in your fruit/milk/meat, don't invite her to lunch. @babybokchoy | TakePart.com