The Sunday I moved from Michigan to Maryland to start a new job on Monday was an eventful ride. I drove straight through as far as Hancock, Maryland, just over the Pennsylvania line, then drove through town on the business route and stopped at a Sheetz gas station. While the tank was filling, I went in and found a cute fast-food diner, where I ordered a mushroom Swiss burger. On the way back to the car, I took a bite of the burger and, I’ll admit, I smelled something off about it. It didn’t bother me much because I’d always had a stomach of steel – I could eat food with dairy that spent the day in the sun on the hood of a rusty Mustang and it wouldn’t phase me. I got in my car and continued to Rockville eating my burger.
I checked into the hotel, fell asleep around 10pm, then woke up shortly afterward violently ill. At some point, I either hit my head somewhere in the bathroom and knocked myself out, or just plain fainted, but I woke up and realized I was in a “call 9-1-1” situation. It was 1:30am, an emergency crew came and off we went to the hospital where I continued vomiting with my IV in place. When the doctor came, I told him about the hamburger, and he said they could send it for analysis if I brought some of it with me. Well, none that was in any shape to go to a lab. I was supposed to be at work for my first day orientation at 8:30. I made it to the front desk of E.R. and ordered a cab back to my room where I managed to get a shower and still make it to work on time.
The next day, being now very close to our nation’s capital, I went into Washington D.C. to the FDA to report the distribution of bad meat. I was told that without a sample of the original hamburger they couldn’t do anything. Later my brother sent me a link to a news article reporting ConAgra Beef Company of Greeley, Colorado (which now operates as Swift Foods), ordered a massive recall of 19 million pounds of meat sold nationwide due to E. coli outbreaks. E. coli is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys. The 2002 outbreak led to many illnesses that caused kidney failure, neurological impairment, and one death. The law firm that represented people who sued ConAgra (I wasn’t one of them) helped get compensation for many victims, some of whom were children that had to be put on dialysis.
As for me, the stomach of steel was now a memory of my youth, and it was years before I could eat grilled mushrooms much less ground beef. In 22 years I still haven’t had a mushroom swiss burger. I’m just grateful that all of my body parts are still present and functioning. I guess the neurological impairment is arguable. Only three million pounds of the meat that was recalled was ever accounted for, so it’s unfortunate that both the hospital and the USDA couldn’t do anything with my claim unless I brought a meat sample.
Hamburger is made in huge batches, using meat trimmings from multiple suppliers that are constantly intermixed so that finished products typically contain meat from dozens or even hundreds of animals. One DNA analysis by researchers at Colorado State University found that the average four-ounce burger patty contains tissue from 57 separate cows; some patties had tissue from more than a thousand animals.
