We've got to admit: U.S. food safety has improved tremendously over the course of the 20th century. In 1906 Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" described how the poisoned bread set out to kill rats in meat factories often ended up--along with rat dung and carcasses--in the sausage hoppers. Sinclair's searing exposé sparked reforms that have swept much of the filth out of America's food factories. But recent government warnings about several common foods--ground beef, luncheon meats, eggs, and even sprouts--are again raising questions about what's safe to eat.
The problems that provoked those warnings stem in part from changes in both food production and American eating habits. The nation's food is now produced mainly by giant industries on huge, often overcrowded ranches and farms. The food is transported over great distances, sometimes without adequate refrigeration. People are eating more foods outside the home. They're eating a greater variety of foods, some raised without following the usual sanitation standards. And the number of virulent or drug-resistant bacteria in foods is rising--probably in part because ranchers feed animals antibiotics to stimulate growth.
While those bacteria can make you sick for several days, usually with diarrhea and fever, they rarely cause any lasting or serious harm to most people. But the risk is much greater in pregnant women, young children, elderly individuals, and those with weakened immunity, such as AIDS or chemotherapy patients. That adds up to a lot of susceptible people--nearly one-fourth of the U.S. population. This year, in a policy shift designed to address that reality, the government confined some of its food-safety advice--its initial warnings on sprouts and all its warnings on lunch meats--to those high-risk groups.
Meanwhile, government and industry are taking a wide range of steps to keep pathogens out of the food chain in the first place, as well they ought to. "You shouldn't have to treat your kitchen like an operating room," says food-safety activist Rodney Leonard, a former official with the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
But at least for now, the main burden falls on you, the consumer. And the government's advice on handling the risks may be hard to swallow: Use a meat thermometer to check every burger, cook your eggs firmly, and heat lunch meats and sprouts. Those measures generally do make sense for the high-risk individuals. But other people need to know the facts--which are laid out below--then decide whether trying to reduce the risk is really worth the effort.
Well-done burgers
When cows are butchered, fecal matter loaded with bacteria sometimes gets onto the meat. As a result, the meat may be contaminated with germs, possibly including a nasty strain called Escherichia coli O157:H7, which killed four hamburger eaters and sickened more than 700 in a scary outbreak several years ago. Still, most cuts of beef are quite safe to eat. That's because the bacteria lurk on the surface, which almost always gets cooked to germ-killing temperatures.
But when meat is ground up, the bacteria can end up in the center of the meat, which may not get fully cooked. To make matters worse, recent studies have shown that you can't tell by its color whether a burger is adequately cooked. Some turn brown at the center without ever getting sufficiently hot; others stay pink despite high internal heat.
To improve the safety of beef, as well as poultry and fish, the government has instituted the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points program (HACCP, pronounced HASS-up). These procedures are designed to help industry prevent problems by ensuring proper sanitation and targeting stages where food can become contaminated. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration has approved radiation to kill germs in meat and poultry, although the USDA has not yet approved rules for using it.
Whether HACCP will do the job--and whether irradiation is truly safe, practical, and economical--remains to be seen. Meanwhile, there's no need to panic or turn vegetarian.
Roughly 1 in 500 to 1,000 burgers harbors the dangerous E. coli strain, which is killed by proper cooking. There have been no large outbreaks of food poisoning from beef contaminated with E. coli since 1993.
But in August, Jac Pac Foods recalled some 250,000 pounds of beef patties, all distributed through BJ's Wholesale Club. And Kaye Wachsmuth, deputy administrator for public health and science at the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), says enough people are still getting sick from tainted beef to warrant certain precautions.
Recommendations
First, try to keep the raw juices from beef (or any other meat, poultry, or fish) from contaminating other foods or kitchen items:
Pack raw meat in plastic bags at the store and keep it bagged in your refrigerator or freezer.
Mop up spilled juices with disposable paper towels, not sponges. Then wash your hands and anything that you or the food touched with hot soapy water.
Don't put the cooked meat back on the same plate that held it raw, and don't pour leftover marinade over cooked food unless you've first heated it to a rolling boil for about a minute.
In addition, susceptible individuals--and anyone else who wants to eliminate the risk entirely--should cook the center of their burgers to at least 160° F (medium). You can check the temperature with an instant-read meat thermometer (digital or dial), inserted sideways if necessary. A more convenient though more expensive option is to slide a disposable "T-stick" into the meat; it turns black when the temperature hits about 160°. Our very limited tests with burgers suggest that the sticks do work as claimed if inserted correctly.
In restaurants, high-risk individuals should order their burgers at least medium well or, better yet, avoid burgers entirely when eating out.
Hot 'n' cold cuts?
Last fall and winter, 15 deaths, six miscarriages, and 100 illnesses were linked to contaminated lunch meats and hot dogs from Bil Mar Foods, a Michigan-based subsidiary of Sara Lee Corp. The meat had been infected with a bacterial strain called Listeria monocytogenes. On New Year's Eve, the USDA shut down Thorn Apple Valley's Arkansas meat-packing plant, which subsequently recalled 30 million pounds of listeria-tainted franks and cold cuts. In the first half of 1999, at least 13 other companies pulled similarly contaminated meat products off the shelves.
"These foods are cooked at the plant, which should kill all bacteria," says Morris Potter, the FDA's director of food safety. "Apparently, plants are having trouble preventing recontamination after the cooking."
Listeria is indeed difficult to eradicate: It's widespread, and it survives even on the rubber or stainless-steel surfaces in meat plants. USDA surveys find the harmful listeria strain in about 1 of every 40 ready-to-eat meats, including cold cuts, hot dogs, and sausages. The risk, however, is much less than those figures make it appear, possibly because it takes an unusually large dose of listeria to cause sickness. However, listeria keeps growing even in refrigerated foods, so it can multiply to potentially harmful levels if the food sits in the store or your refrigerator for a long time, as lunch meats often do. And any germ is more dangerous in foods that usually aren't heated.
In May shaken officials at the Food Safety Inspection Service admitted that previous efforts to control listeria had been inadequate and announced several new measures. Meat processors are supposed to reassess their listeria-control practices and develop a valid plan for managing the germ. The FSIS has advised processors to test for listeria in the factory and in the food, a recommendation that might eventually become mandatory. And the agency is developing food-safety standards for all ready-to-eat products.
Recommendations
Unlike the other potentially dangerous bacteria, listeria appears to cause serious illness almost exclusively in high-risk individuals. In addition to the standard advice about washing everything that touches these foods, susceptible individuals should:
Heat lunch meats, sausages, and hot dogs in a pan, oven, or pot (but not a microwave) till they're steaming hot.
Not buy lunch meats and hot dogs if the expiration date is looming (or has passed), and not let them languish in the fridge beyond that date.
Hard-cooked eggs
In July FDA regulators proposed labeling egg cartons with warnings about the threat of food poisoning from salmonella. "Eggs may contain harmful bacteria known to cause serious illness," the proposed label cautions. "For your protection, keep eggs refrigerated, cook eggs until yolks are firm ... and cook foods containing eggs thoroughly." Stores, warehouses, and trucks will also be required to refrigerate eggs; and the President's Council on Food Safety will develop a "strategic plan" on egg safety by Nov. 1.
Two facts about eggs helped trigger the FDA's actions. The number of egg-related salmonella poisonings has continued to rise through the mid-1990s, though some recent evidence suggests a possible reversal in that trend. And roughly two-thirds of salmonella outbreaks with an identified cause have been linked to eggs, according to the FDA's Potter. That's partly because Americans eat so many raw eggs, in foods such as Caesar salad, hollandaise sauce, and eggnog, and so many undercooked eggs. And it's partly because eggs (and hens) are much more likely than other foods to harbor one of the dangerous strains of salmonella--in this case, Salmonella enteriditis.
Recommendations
The actual risk of encountering a tainted egg is very small--an estimated 1 in 20,000, FDA officials say, though the risk could change unpredictably as new bacterial strains emerge. Knowing those odds, most people should feel free to decide whether the risk warrants paying extra for pasteurized eggs--now available in some states--or sacrificing their desire for, say, mousse or soft-boiled eggs.
But for susceptible individuals, even a very low risk is too high. They clearly should take the following precautions:
Look for pasteurized eggs.
Don't eat raw eggs or foods containing them unless they've been pasteurized.
Cook unpasteurized eggs until yolks are firm, and fully cook foods containing eggs.
Buy eggs only if sold in a refrigerated case.
Store eggs in the coldest part of the refrigerator, not in the door, and use them within three to five weeks.
Check for the "USDA graded" symbol, found on about 30 percent of egg cartons. Participants in that voluntary grading program are prohibited from repackaging and redating old eggs.
Boiled sprouts
Raw sprouts, the quintessential health food, have now been branded as potentially dangerous. Since 1995 more than 1,000 Americans have fallen ill and one has died in nearly a dozen outbreaks involving contaminated sprouts. Most of the outbreaks were traced to salmonella, the rest to E. coli O157:H7.
Health officials suspect that seeds used to grow sprouts become contaminated in the field by manure, or during handling or storage. The temperature, acidity, nutrients, and other conditions for sprouting are also ideal for bacteria. And an FDA investigation last year of 45 sprout facilities, some of them just sheds and modified buses, found unsanitary conditions, such as the presence of rodents and the use of untested well water.
Recommendations
The FDA has worked for several years with sprout growers to develop sanitary strategies such as soaking seeds in a chlorine compound. But after three outbreaks of sprout-related illnesses this year, Dr. Jane Henney, commissioner of the FDA, issued a warning to all people who want to reduce their risk of such illness--not just the susceptible minority who were initially warned. "At this time, the best way to control this risk is not to eat raw sprouts," Henney advised.
For sprout addicts there is another way, though it's more trouble. "Basically, you submerge the sprouts in boiling water," says Dr. Charles Sizer. "Let the water come to a boil again, and take them out after ten seconds. Put them on a paper towel and shake them a little." Sizer is the director of the National Center for Food Safety and Technology, an Illinois-based group working with the FDA and the sprout industry to devise a better solution. "The sprouts maintain their crunchiness after boiling," Sizer says. If you like, you can chill them before eating. Bon appétit!
|
Search
