That's it - no more hamburger

[Phonedave]

I tend not to eat the frozen patties, but not from a sanitary standpoint, but from a taste standpoint.

I KNOW what happens with the food we eat. I did work in a grocery store for many years while in High School and College. In fact I used to make the ground beef at times. While we did not do anything so unsanitary as dropping it on the floor or sneezing into it, we did save scraps and trimming for it.

Of course the scraps and trimmings were from out own operations, so we knew where they came from. We would get sub-primals in cryovac and break them down outselves, using two peice boneless chuck sub-primals, augmented with trimmings, to make the ground beef.

Grinders were sprayed with the high pressure hot sprayer, then scrubbed, then sprayed with a sanitizer and left to soak, and then sprayed down again with a high pressure wash - as were cutting tables, band saws, cubers, etc.

But really, so much stuff gets into food, and it is not handled quite a nicely as you would like. Dairy and frozen was peice unloaded in the parking lot, sometimes in the blazing heat, and would sit out for 15-20 minutes before we could get it into the walk in coolers.

Every night all leaf greens come in off the produce racks, get culled for any brown spots, the old part of the cut end gets recut to make it look fresh, and then it gets a soak in ice water and overnighted in the cold walk in (as opposed to the cool holding room) to crisp up to back out in the AM. Strawberries are constantly being reculled. You pull the moldy ones out and repack the pints.

If dog food came in with mealy moth infestation (or more commonly dog biscuits because they are in cardboard boxes not sealed bags) the product spent 24 hours in the deep freezer walk-ins to kill off the moths, and then was put back on the shelves.

If a case of canned goods came in, with one of the cans busted open and the case riddled with maggots, the still sealed cans would be washed and stocked on the sheves.

So what is the point of all this nastyness? I guess unless you are growing your own food hydroponically, in a sterile environment, it's going to be pretty nasty.

-dave

[LA Bob]

Most of the above makes the case for irradiated food. Whole Foods Market won't sell it -- it doesn't fit their marketing stance and their justification for charging more for EVERYTHING they sell -- but just about everybody else would, if the government would get off the dime and stop wasting their energies and budgets counting rat turds and bug legs.

There are safe, effective levels of radiation for everything from a box of strawberries to a whole frozen cow. The added safety and shelf-life gained would offset the minor costs involved.