Clean your grill with hamburgers? It looks like you can! I wanted to keep it light today, but there was this article in the NY Times…

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota [Beef Products Inc.] came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

I would hardly call this product ground beef and I leave it to you to follow the link and read the whole article to find out how they process this burger product, which incidentally is purchased by McDonald’s and school lunch programs among others.

Ammonia has a number of uses, including oven-cleaning:

Simply place a bowl full of ammonia inside your oven overnight and then wipe it clean without effort the next day. Oven racks and pots and pans can be cleaned with ammonia to help them recover their silvery spark.

My issue with the whole issue is that quality and safety have to be priorities from end-to-end. You can’t inspect quality or safety into a product. You can’t inject a silver bullet at the end of the line to make the unsafe safe. There are too many unknowns and the next thing you know, you’re creating super-germs that are resistant to anything we can throw at them.

I don’t want food that’s been boiled, nuked, pasteurized, irradiated, over-cooked, or injected with ammonia to bring it into acceptably safe standards. I want it raised and processed cleanly and safely from beginning to end so none of that is necessary. Perhaps if we weren’t chasing pennies per pound (both consumers and businesses), we could afford a non-lethal food supply.

If you are still eating commercial burgers, please cook them to 162 °F.

If you’re curious about E.coli O157:H7, this is an informative Web page.