North Carolina may be a red state politically, but many meat eaters are blue in the face crying foul over a state ban on rare burgers in restaurants. The state now requires restaurants to cook their hamburgers to a temperature of 155 degrees, which health officials say is enough to kill unhealthy bacteria such as E. coli.
While North Carolina’s citizens are still allowed to eat their hamburgers anyway they wish at home, restaurants can’t go any lower than medium on the cooking chart. Word has it that this legislation has created somewhat of an underground red meat-eating movement, a bit like the speakeasies of Prohibition days, I suppose.
North Carolina restaurants can still serve steaks rare to customers since they don’t pose the same threat as ground meat. If contaminants exist on a piece of steak they are usually on the outside and killed during the cooking process. However, when beef is ground up the bacteria is mixed inside.
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More than 3,000 pounds of ground beef patties are being recalled by a California company for potential E. coli contamination, and other ground beef products may also be affected. The U.S. Department of Agriculture made the announcement this weekend after the American Food Service of Pico Rivera recalled the products.
The recalled beef was produced on January 31, and carries the establishment number “EST 1913″ inside the USDA inspection mark. The beef was sent to restaurants in the southern region of California. The USDA fears packages of the contaminated beef are still in the freezers of many restaurants.
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I’m terrified of food borne illnesses and rightly so. E. coli, salmonella and hepatitis are only a few of the diseases that can be contracted from food that is improperly prepared. I’ve compiled the following tips for safe food handling from the CDC, USDA and FDA websites.
When you prepare:
- Wash your hands thoroughly before and after handling food. Also be sure you wash your hands when switching from meat to produce.
- Freezing meat (raw or cooked) is perfectly fine but be sure to thaw it properly. Plan ahead so that it can be thawed slowly in the refrigerator, as opposed to on the counter at room temperature.
- As a general rule, rinse all fresh produce.
- Do not rinse your chicken. Rinsing chicken is unnecessary and only spreads bacteria from the raw meat to your sink where it so easily travels to other areas.
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According to the Associated Press “the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that 12 people had been hospitalized and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was looking at 10 other cases probably linked to the outbreak. Freshway Foods of Sidney, Ohio, said it was recalling romaine lettuce sold under the Freshway and Imperial Sysco brands.”
The FDA is currently investigating the E. Coli outbreak, which seems to be focused on lettuce grown in Arizona as a possible source. According to some sources, the lettuce causing the outbreak was not packaged in bags to be sold directly to consumers, but instead is lettuce used at supermarket and restaurant salad bars.
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Vice President Joe Biden is known for his verbal gaffes. But this time, he’s spot on – it’s tough enough to afford food in these uncertain economic times, people should not have to worry about the safety of that food.
Biden co-chairs the Food Safety Working Group along with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The theme will be contamination prevention.
“The focus is to have a completely different emphasis than we’ve had in the past,” Biden said. “We’re going to make our new priority preventing (food contamination) from happening in the first place.”
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