And in today's Gross Food News: Your chicken is probs covered in poop. I will pause while you shudder. Actually, it's not that bad, really. There's something like a 50/50 chance that there's no poop on your chicken. There, does that make you feel better?
Now that pink slime has been vanquished, more or less, researchers wondered to themselves what other meat horrors we could dig up. So they went and bought 120 raw chicken products from grocery stores in 10 major American cities and tested them all for E. coli. AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED? Do you really want to know?
What a delightful surprise! A whole 52% of those chickens were poop-free. That's the glass half-full interpretation. Now let's go to the dark side: 48% of the chickens were contaminated with E. coli. Ew.
So now you know. How many of us have chicken in our refrigerators right now? My family ate a roast chicken for dinner just last night -- which is why I'm glad I didn't hear this news until today.
Anyway, supposedly this wasn't the death-y kind E. coli. Just the kind linked to urinary tract infections, ladies. And supposedly washing your chicken might help, especially if you wash it with antibacterial soap, which as we all know tastes even better with chicken than a lukewarm chardonnay.
And given how well we're doing these days with food safety, this doesn't make me feel super confident about our chicken. We just heard that instead of seriously demanding limits to antibiotics in meat (or an outright ban on its use for healthy animals) the utterly useless puppet FDA is kinda-sorta offering "guidance" that suggests that the meat producers voluntarily reduce their use of antibiotics. You know, if they can find it in the kindness of their hearts.
Which means nothing will change.
Ugh, now I'm frothing at the mouth. You see? THIS is why I've stopped buying meat at the grocery store at all! Antibiotics, E. coli -- this is all the result of our massive meat industrial complex. I get my meat directly from farms, or from my local butcher. I know not everyone has those options, and that sucks. Something has got to give. I just can't see how we can take any more of these gross meat exposes.
Does this story about E. coli on sicken you, or are you okay with it?
Image via snowpea&bokchoy/Flickr