Well duh ………..

So CBC Marketplace is going to air a segment tonight about how “tenderizing” meat makes it more susceptible to contamination by various buggers.  I wonder how many Canadians will be astonished by the revelation.  Quite a few I suspect.

I’ve long claimed that as a species we are ultimately too stupid to survive our own evolution.  Buying “tenderized” meat is just one example where convenience trumps science (or even common sense).  But that should be no surprise – science comes dead last for most citizens of the world, let alone Canadian citizens.

Here’s a link to a 7 year old USDA publication on the subject.  Nothing special about that particular link, it just happened to be the first one (of many) that popped up on a Google search.  It shouldn’t come as any surprise to a sentient being that pounding the surface contamination into the centre of a piece of meat and then undercooking the meat is probably a really risky – how about stupid – practice. 

The X-L recall has focussed attention in this country on the safety of our meat but that attention will quickly pass.  CFIA likely dropped the ball and X-L management was clearly negligent but come on folks, if you buy this stuff and cook it like a fool then the wonder is not that a dozen people got sick, the wonder is that a couple hundred thousand consumers DID NOT get sick. 

And let’s take a moment for sympathy for Alison Redford.  She said what needed to be said.  XL threw out literally hundreds of tons of perfectly good meat, so much meat that it came close to overwhelming the Brooks landfill capacity to accept it.  Redford made the perfectly logical, perfectly sensible comment that this meat could have gone to a better destination – like possibly to feed people who desperately need a good meal.  Hell, I’d have happily eaten it.  Cook it properly and there’s ZERO risk.  But from a public image and political perspective there was no way in hell that XL, CFIA or Gerry Ritz could ever have justified doing the right thing.  So all that meat got dumped and I actually heard one genius caller to a phone in show asking what the implications were for the Brooks water supply.  Evidently she thought all that e-coli was going to wash off the meat and run into the ground water.  There’s literally no hope for that level of stupidity.

I love my steaks cooked bloody rare.  “Break the horns off, wipe its ass, introduce it to the grill and bring it to the table” as far as I’m concerned.  But that’s for an intact piece of muscle.  Take that same piece of meat and grind it up and I’m going to want you to cook the living hell out of it.  If the rest of the consuming public would adopt the same common sense procedures we wouldn’t need Marketplace to lecture us about what should be patently obvious. 

The amazing thing about common sense is how remarkably UNcommon it actually is.