Modern Caveman by Brett L. Markham

Author:Brett L. Markham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Post-harvest interventions have improved the microbiological safety of beef overall,14 but ground beef in particular has a poor record of safety, having caused 3,801 verified cases of food poisoning between 1998 and 2010. Chicken has been even worse, with 6,896 cases of food poisoning during the same period.15

For a bit of perspective, however, raw vegetables are the single largest cause of food-borne illness.16 This is because the producers fail to observe common-sense precautions (as well as regulations) about how long they should wait before harvesting produce after spreading raw manure on fields as a fertilizer.

Obviously, living life entails risks. You can’t hide in a shell and be protected from everything and still live, but you can (and should) take the following precautions:

• Wash your hands, utensils, and cutting boards thoroughly, and then dry them with a paper towel.

• Wash produce. This entails scrubbing root vegetables with a brush, running more delicate produce under running water in a colander, discarding the outer leaves of greens, and blotting or rubbing dry with a paper towel.

• When you are working with raw meats and vegetables, avoid cross-contamination by using separate cutting boards and utensils. Wash your hands when switching tasks.

• Use a meat thermometer to assure meat is sufficiently cooked. The safe-tested guidelines issued by the USDA have recently changed.17 Ground meats (including pork, beef, lamb, and veal) should reach an internal temperature of 160ºF, poultry (parts or ground) should reach 165ºF, whole cuts of pork, lamb, beef, and veal should reach 145ºF, and seafood should reach 145ºF. The meat needs to be allowed to rest for three minutes after the required temperature has been attained.

• Don’t use foods past their expiration date; keep your refrigerator at 40ºF or below and your freezer at 0ºF or below.

Most of the microbiological contamination of meat comes as an inevitable result of dealing with a natural product. Animals make manure, and that manure has lots of nasty germs. They have manure on their feet and backsides, and sometimes they even roll in the stuff. When chickens are processed, for example, the carcass is scalded in order to facilitate removal of the feathers. This process mixes caked feces on the feet or rear of the animal with water and distributes it all over the skin.

When I process chickens for meat, I take extreme care to do everything I can to prevent contamination and keep the meat safe by changing the scalding water for every bird, keeping everything hosed down and sterilized with bleach, removing entrails without getting feces on the bird, using rapid cooling, and so forth. But a single bird also takes me twenty minutes to process, which is unacceptable productivity for any sort of commercial operation that has to deal with market forces that keep retail prices low. The hard reality is that any mass-produced meat should be assumed to have fecal bacterial contamination of the surface, and ground meats should be assumed to have that contamination spread throughout. This, however, is not a problem so long as safe handling and cooking procedures are followed.

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