Two All-Beef Patties, Special Sauce, Lettuce, Cheese, Pickles, Onion, and Ammonia ??!!

[M. Johnson]

Two All-Beef Patties, Special Sauce, Lettuce, Cheese, Pickles, Onion, and…Ammonia??!!
Posted by David Kramer on January 9, 2010 05:27 PM

Here’s a story that should turn your stomach. It seems that a company called Beef Products Inc. has been adding ammonia to their beef products to allegedly make them safe from E. coli.

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia. The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products. With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment.

You can read the rest of this stomach-turning story here. As I’ve written about in a previous blog, this is what happens when you let a forced monopoly government entity like the USDA or the FDA become the sole arbiter of deciding what’s “good” for us.

[Thanks to John Hightower]