America Is Hungry, And Someone Has Got For Keep Us Fed

America is hungry, and someone has got to keep us fed. We live in a country with the luxury of convenience, so naturally hamburgers are as â€Å"American as apple pie† with the ease of picking them up at a drive-thru window, and ability to munch them one-handed, and the extreme affordability all factoring in to put them on most people’s favorite food list. Unfortunately for the burger lovers out there, these lunchtime staples are also harboring a hidden danger; a potentially deadly food borne pathogen named Escherichia coli that’s been making headlines more frequently as of late. Escherichia coli, or E. coli for short, are most commonly found in ground beef. It is naturally present in the bovine gastrointestinal system, the mutated strain,†¦show more content†¦There are many areas things can go wrong in the process of raising, slaughtering, and packaging the beef for human consumption. Especially so in slaughterhouses and processing plants, as there are many potential contamination hazards, and most depend on human attention to catch and correct. The cattle may arrive at the slaughterhouse with feces on their hides, which present the first risk of contamination as it can be very difficult to remove the hides from the animal without transferring any of the pathogen bearing feces to the carcass. The second high-risk area in the slaughterhouse is the gutting station, where at some locations, workers are expected to keep up an extremely fast pace, as many as sixty cattle per hour, which does not provide adequate time to prevent accidents. A ruptured gut sac can leave a carcass intended for human consumption covered in fecal matter or stomach acids all potentially containing the potentially deadly foodborne bacteria (Schlosser 203). At these slaughterhouses, steps are taken to clean and disinfect the carcasses, but E. coli is hard to kill. It is encouraged by the Agricultural Department to begin testing at these locations for E. coli, but most choose not to, as they stand to suffer significant monetary damage if they discover any E. coli present in their products (Moss 3). Most slaughterhouses will not sell their products to processing plants that plan to pre-screen the meat before combining and