Me, Meat, and Salmonella

[Guest guest]

*Me, Meat, and Salmonella*

For most of my 65 year life, I have been eating rare and raw

meat. The one and only time I ever got Salmonella food poisoning, it was

from Shrimp Szechwan from a Chinese restaurant in New York City.

When I was 10, I thought I had been poisoned from my Mom's stew

(which I had hated for as long as I could remember), but it turned out to be

appendicitis.

When I was a child, my father insisted all food be cooked to death.

If peas rolled on his dinner plate, they were not cooked enough. He liked

steak and roasts cooked to the point that there was no blood or moisture in

the meat. My Mom, on the other hand, liked her meat medium rare. I

like my meat as rare as possible.

My Dad grew up in a poor neighborhood, so food freshness and proper

refrigeration was not to be trusted. My Mom grew up in a Middle Class

neighborhood where food was safer to eat less cooked.

When I was in Junior College I took a course in meat inspection.

The Veterinarian who taught the class gave us a formal introduction to

Salmonella and his buddies. In one lab, we were shown different pieces of

meat. One piece came from a butcher in the good section of a nearby city.

Smell and color were perfect. We graded the steak as prime. The prof

bought it for his dinner.

Next, he showed us a cheap steak from a market in a poor

neighborhood. Color was poor. It was a not steak from a prime or choice

animal. He bought the steak as a treat for his dog.

Then he showed us a steak which had been marked down to half-price,

with a warning which stated " use today or freeze. " He had us sniff the

steak. There was a very slight smell. Faint but nasty. He warned us to

remember that smell. He said that when meat had a very slight smell like

that, it could be cooked well done, but cooking it less than well done would

be a dangerous undertaking.

He then showed us a movie on Salmonella food poisoning from the USDA

in the 1940s. People who had experienced Salmonella food poisoning related

their experiences to the camera. The consensus was that the pain from the

food poisoning was so bad that they hoped they would die so the pain,

vomiting, and diarrhea would end. The movie included some footage of a

woman sitting on a toilet vomiting into a pal while she squirted out the

other end. Really gross noises of vomiting and diarrhea. It sure

impressed us with the message that Salmonella was not to be trifled with.

After the movie, the prof moved all the meat to a picnic cooler with

ice to take home with him. When all the meat was safely put away, he

brought out another steak. This one was marked down half price, but the

last day of sale was 10 days previous. He had bought it 10 days ago and

put it into the lab refrigerator to " age " for this lab on Salmonella.

Before he even unwrapped the steak, the stench was bad. None of my fellow

students wanted to get close and give it a good sniff. I got close.

Really repulsive smells of rotting food interest me. I can sense my primal

warning mechanisms kicking into high gear. The Prof told us * " This meat is

garbage.* * Some poor people eat this sort of meat if they cook it enough,

but even if they did not get the runs or vomit, such meat is not good for

long term health. " *

Fast forward about 20 years. My friend Sharon was visiting from

Buffalo and was marveling at the quality of fruit in my fruit bowl and the

steak I was about to put on the fire in my side yard. She asked me where I

got my food. I told her Tops Supermarket. She was shocked because her

Tops supermarket never had fruit and meat that looked that good.

The next time I was visiting Buffalo, Sharon asked me if I would

take her food shopping because my car had A/C and hers did not. We drove

to the Tops supermarket closest her. The food looked wretched. I stopped

her from putting food into her basket. I asked her if she had time for a

" scientific expedition " . She said sure.

I drove us to a big Tops Market on the other side of town where the

people shopping looked like professionals. Sharon lived in a working class

poor white neighborhood. The store was better lit than her Tops Market.

The employees looked happier. The exact same cuts of meat were on

sale. The meat and produce looked vastly superior. The round trip drive

added about 45 minutes to the shopping time.

When I later moved to Buffalo, I could not afford to live in a

really nice neighborhood, but I always took the time to drive to a really

good neighborhood for food shopping.

In the late 1980s I ate a lot of raw steak. I used to go out

dancing, I danced non-stop until the bar closed, then I drove home. All that

dancing made me hungry. Home was a half hour drive. So I stopped at the

all night Tops market, bought a steak and ate it while I drove home.

Fast forward to 1992. I was living in New Orleans, was unemployed,

and desperate enough that I was on food stamps. Outside the food stamp

distribution place was a guy handing out fliers for specials to food stamp

recipients. I took a flier. The meat was amazingly cheap.

So after collecting my monthly allotment of food stamps I took a bus

to a stop about 10 blocks away from the market having the sale. The market

was in a really run down dangerous looking black neighborhood. Lots of

broken glass on the sidewalks. As I entered the market there was an

intense smell of Salmonella. At first I assumed one of the store's big

coolers had died and they had not yet finished scrubbing it down. But as I

approached the meat counter, the smell became almost overpowering.

All the meat in the meat case was almost black in color and much of

it looked slimy. There was a big sign warning people that meat was ONLY

for making gumbo or other foods which were stewed for many many hours. The

sign said that pan frying a steak would make someone sick. Other signs

were about sanitizing hands and kitchen after handling the raw meat before

preparing any other foods.

People were actually buying this meat! I was horrified! The

butcher saw my look and engaged me in conversation. * " Poor people gotta

eat. Government never gives out enough food stamps to feed a family. So

people make gumbo and jambalaya from our meat. We buy meat from

supermarkets who are about to throw out old meat. We wash it down with

baking soda water to cut the slime. And we keep it very cold, and sell it

as quickly as possible. " *

I remembered my college professor's comment that eating tainted

meat, even if were cooked sufficiently to prevent Salmonella poisoning was

not healthy. When I arrived in New Orleans I saw many poor people who

looked sickly, like they had poor health & /or were on the verge of getting

ill. I felt like I was living in a wretchedly poor third world country.

That market provided me with an answer as to why so many poor people looked

like they were so sickly.

In my observation, most folks on foodstamps have jobs, but the jobs

do not pay enough to both pay rent and eat. So they are on foodstamps.

The tight money situation is compounded by many poor people being tobacco

addicts, so even less money to buy food.

The one and only time I ever smelled such intense Salmonella as the

meats being sold in that market was after I returned home after my month and

a half evacuation after Hurricane Katrina. The streets were lined with

refrigerators which had been sitting for a month or more with no electricity

and the food had turned to a pustulant goo. [More photos

here<http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com/2005/12/katrina-refrigerator-photos.html\

>

..]

Some enterprising folk collected the newer model pustulant

refrigerators from wealthy neighborhoods, steam cleaned them, then sold them

to poor people who could not afford to buy a new refrigerator.

Seems to me that those refrigerators could never be 100% sterilized,

so low level Salmonella would be endemic in households with refrigerators

which had once been filled with pustulant rot.

I bought a new refrigerator.

Alobar